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PATRINS 

ro WHICH IS ADDED 

An INQUIRENDO Into the WIT & 
Other Good Parts of HIS LATE MAJ- 
ESTY KING CHARLES the Second 

fFRITTEN Br 

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 




BOSTON 

Printed for Copeland and Day 

6g Comhill 1897 



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COPYRIGHT 1897 BY COPELAND AND DAY 



TO BLISS CARMAN 

ApatriUj according to Romano Lavo-Lil, 
is " a Gypsy trail : handfuls of leaves or 
grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to 
denote, to those behind, the way which 
they have taken." Well, these wild dry 
whims are patrins dropped now in the 
open for our tribe ; but particularly for 
you. They will greet you as you lazily 
come up, and mean : Fare on, and good 
luck love you to the end ! On each 
have I put the date of its writing, as one 
might make memoranda of little leisurely 
adventures in prolonged fair weather ; and 
you will read, in between and all along, a 
record of pleasant lonely paths never very 
far from your own, biggest of Romanys ! 
in the thought-country of our common 
youth. 



Ingraham Hill, South Thomaston, Maine, 
October 19, 1896. 



Contents 

Page 

On the Rabid versus the Harmless Scholar 3 

The Great Playground 13 

On the Ethics of Descent 29 
Some Impressions from the Tudor 

Exhibition 39 

On the Delights of an Incognito 63 

The Puppy : A Portrait 73 
On Dying Considered as a Dramatic 

Situation 83 
A Bitter Complaint of the Ungentle 

Reader 99 

Animum non Coelum 109 

The Precept of Peace 117 
On a Pleasing Encounter with a 

Pickpocket 131 

Reminiscences of a Fine Gentleman 139 

Irish 153 

An Open Letter to the Moon 169 

The Under Dog 181 

Quiet London 191 

The Captives 205 
On Teaching One's Grandmother How 

to Suck Eggs 223 

Wilful Sadness in Literature 233 

An Inquirendo into the Wit and Other 
Good Parts of His Late Majesty, 

King Charles the Second 247 



On the Rabid versus the Harmless 
Scholar 



ON THE RABID VERSUS THE 
HARMLESS SCHOLAR 



A PHILOSOPHER now living, and 
too deserving for any fate but 
choice private oblivion, was in Paris, 
for the first time, a dozen years ago ; 
and having seen and heard there, in the 
shops, parks, and omnibus stations, much 
more baby than he found pleasing, he re- 
marked, upon his return, that it was a 
great pity the French, who are so in love 
with system, had never seen their way to 
shutting up everything under ten years of 
age ! Now, that was the remark of an 
artist in human affairs, and may provoke 
a number of analogies. What is in the 
making is not a public spectacle. It ought 
to be considered very outrageous, on the 
death of a painter or a poet, to exhibit 
those rough first drafts, which he, living, 
had the acumen to conceal. And if, to an 



4 ON THE RABID FERSUS 

impartial eye, in a foreign city, native in- 
nocents seem too aggressively to the fore, 
why should not the seclusion desired for 
them be visited a thousandfold upon the 
heads, let us say, of students, who are also 
in a crude transitional state, and under- 
going a growth much more distressing to 
a sensitive observer than the physical ? 
Youth is the most inspiring thing on earth, 
but not the best to let loose, especially 
while it carries swaggeringly that most 
dangerous of all blunderbusses, knowledge 
at half-cock. There is, indeed, no more 
melancholy condition than that of healthy 
boys scowling over books, in an eternal 
protest against their father Adam's fall 
from a state of relative omniscience. Sir 
Phihp Sidney thought it was " a piece of 
the Tower of Babylon's curse that a man 
should be put to school to learn his 
mother-tongue ! " The throes of educa- 
tion are as degrading and demoralizing 
as a hanging, and, when the millennium 
sets in, will be as carefully screened from 
the laity. Around the master and the 
pupil will be reared a portly and decorous 
Chinese wall, which shall pen within their 
proper precincts the din of hic^ hac^ hoCy 



THE HARMLESS SCHOLAR 5 

and the steam of suppers sacrificed to 
Pallas. 

The more noxious variety of student, 
however, is not young. He is " in the 
midway of this our mortal life " ; he is 
fearfully foraging, with intent to found and 
govern an academy ; he runs in squads 
after Anglo-Saxon or that blatant beast, 
Comparative Mythology ; he stops you 
on 'change to ask if one has not good 
grounds for believing that there was such 
a person as Pope Joan. He can never 
let well enough alone. Heine must be 
translated and Junius must be identified. 
The abodes of hereditary scholars are de- 
populated by the red flag of the nouveau 
instruit. He infests every civilized coun- 
try; the army-worm is nothing to him. 
He has either lacked early discipline alto- 
gether, or gets tainted, late in life, with 
the notion that he has never shown suffi- 
ciently how intellectual he really is. In 
every contemplative-looking person he 
sees a worthy victim, and his kindling eye, 
as he bears down upon you, precludes 
escape : he can achieve no peace unless he 
is driving you mad with all which you 
fondly dreamed you had left behind in old 



6 ON THE RABID FERSUS 

S/s accursed lecture-room. You may 
commend to him in vain the reminder 
which Erasmus left for the big-wigs, that 
it is the quality of what you know which 
tells, and never its quantity. It is incon- 
ceivable to him that you should shut your 
impious teeth against First Principles, and 
fear greatly to displace in yourself the illi- 
teracies you have painfully acquired. 

Judge, then, if the learner of this type 
(and in a bitterer degree, the learneress) 
could but be safely cloistered, how much 
simpler would become the whole problem 
of living ! How profoundly would it ben- 
efit both society and himself could the for- 
mationary mind, destined, as like as not, to 
no ultimate development, be sequestered 
by legal statute in one imperative limbo, 
along with babes, lovers, and training 
athletes ! ^icquid ostendis mihi sic, in- 
credulus odi. 

For the true scholar's sign-manual is 
not the midnight lamp on a folio. He 
knows ; he is baked through ; all super- 
fluous effort and energy are over for him. 
To converse consumedly upon the weather, 
and compare notes as to "whether it is 
likely to hold up for to-morrow," — this. 



THE HARMLESS SCHOLAR 7 

says Hazlitt, " is the end and privilege of 
a life of study." Secretly, decently, pleas- 
antly, has he acquired his mental stock ; 
insensibly he diffuses, not always knowl- 
edge, but sometimes the more needful 
scorn of knowledge. Among folk who 
break their worthy heads indoors over 
Mr. Browning and Madame Blavatsky, 
he moves cheerful, incurious, and free, on 
glorious good terms with arts and crafts 
for which he has no use, with extraneous 
languages which he will never pursue, with 
vague Muses impossible to invite to din- 
ner. He is strictly non-educational : 

''Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! 
No hungry generations tread thee down.'* 

He loathes information and the givers and 
takers thereof. Like Mr. Lang, he laments 
bitterly that Oxford is now a place where 
many things are being learned and taught 
with great vigor. The main business to 
him is to live gracefully, without mental 
passion, and to get off alone into a corner 
for an affectionate view of creation. A 
mystery serves his turn better than a his- 
tory. It is to be remembered that had 
the Rev. Laurence Sterne gone to gaze 



8 ON THE RABID FERSUS 

upon the spandrils of Rouen Cathedral, 
we should all have lost th^fille de chambre^ 
the dead ass, and Maria by the brookside. 
Any one of these is worth more than 
hieroglyphics ; but who is to attain that 
insight that these are so, except the man 
of culture, who has the courage to forget 
at times even his sole science, and fall 
back with delight upon a choice assortment 
of ignorances ? 

The scholar's own research, from his 
cradle, clothes him in privacy ; nor will 
he ever invade the privacy of others. 
It is not with a light heart that he con- 
templates the kindergarten system. He 
himself, holding his tongue, and fleeing 
from Junius and Pope Joan, from cubic 
roots and the boundaries of Hindostan, 
from the delicate difference between the 
idiom of Maeterlinck and that of Ollen- 
dorff, must be an evil sight to Chautau- 
quans, albeit approved of the angels. He 
has little to utter which will sound wise, 
the full-grown, finished soul ! If he had, 
he would of his own volition seek a cell 
in that asylum for protoplasms, which we 
have made bold to recommend. 

The truth is, very few can be trusted 



THE HARMLESS SCHOLAR ^ 9 

with an education. In the old days, 
while this was a faith, boredom and ner- 
vous prostration were not common, and 
social conditions were undeniably pictur- 
esque. Then, as now, quiet was the zenith 
of power : the mellow mind was unexcur- 
sive and shy. Then, as now, though 
young clerical Masters of Arts went stag- 
gering abroad with heads lolling like 
Sisyphus' stone, the ideal worth and 
weight grew " lightly as a flower." 
Sweetly wrote the good Sprat of his fa- 
mous friend Cowley : "His learning sat 
exceedingly close and handsomely upon 
him : it was not embossed on his mind, 
but enamelled.'' The best to be said of 
any knowing one among us, is that he 
does not readily show what deeps are in 
him ; that he is unformidable, and reminds 
whomever he meets of a distant or de- 
ceased uncle. Initiation into noble facts 
has not ruined him for this world nor the 
other. It was a beautiful brag which 
James Howell, on his first going be- 
yond sea, March the first, in the year 
sixteen hundred and eighteen, made to 
his father. He gives thanks for " that 
most indulgent and costly Care you have 



lo RABID FERSUS HARMLESS SCHOLAR 

been pleased, in so extraordinary a manner, 
to have had of my Breeding, (tho' but 
one child of Fifteen) by placing me in a 
choice Methodical School so far distant 
from your dwelling, under a Learned (tho' 
Lashing) Master ; and by transplanting 
me thence to Oxford to be graduated ; 
and so holding me still up by the chin, 
until I could swim without Bladders. 
This patrimony of liberal Education you 
have been pleased to endow me withal, I 
now carry along with me abroad as a sure 
inseparable Treasure ; nor do I feel it any 
burden or incumbrance unto me at all ! " 

There, in the closing phrase, spoke the 
post-Elizabethan pluck. Marry, any man 
does well since, who can describe the 
aggregated agonies of his brain as no incum- 
brance, as less, indeed, than a wife and 
posterity ! To have come to this is to 
have earned the freedom of cities, and to 
sink the schoolmaster as if he had never 
been. 



The Great Playground 



THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 

IT has seemed to many thoughtful 
readers, within the last fifty or sixty 
years, that Wordsworth's Ode on the In- 
timations is altogether mistaken in its 
assumption that the open-air world is 
dearer to the child than to the man : or 
that the Heaven which so easily fuses 
with it in our idea lies nearer to the 
former than to the latter. Some abnor- 
mally perceptive child (like the infant 
W. W. himself) may have a clear sense 
of " glory in the grass, of splendor in the 
flower/' But the appreciation of natural 
objects is infinitely stronger, let us say, 
in the babe of thirty ; and so is even the 
the appreciation of the diversions which 
they provide. Were it not for the pros- 
pects of unforeseen and adventurous com- 
pany abroad, the child prefers to play in 
the shed. But the post-meridian child. 



14 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 

who is not a "grown-up," but only a 
giant, desires "the house not made with 
hands " : he has a deHcate madness in his 
blood, the moment he breathes wild air. 

Scipio and Laelius cannot keep, to save 
them, from stone-skipping on the strand, 
though they have come abroad for pur- 
poses of political conversation. Poets 
and bookmen are famous escapers of this 
sort. Surrey shooting his toy arrows at 
lighted windows ; Shelley sailing his leaves 
and bank-notes on the Hampstead ponds ; 
Dr. Johnson, of all persons, rolling down 
the fragrant Lincolnshire hills ; Elizabeth 
Inchbald (" a beauty and a virtue," as her 
epitaph at Kensington prettily says) lift- 
ing knockers on April evenings and run- 
ning away, for the innocent deviltry of 
it; — these have discovered the fun and 
the solace of out-of-doors at a stroke, and 
with a conscious rapture impossible to 
their juniors. Master Robin Hood, Earl 
of Huntingdon, probably kept to his per- 
fectly exemplary brigandage because he 
liked the " shaws shene," and objected to 
going home at nightfall. No child ever 
tastes certain romantic joys which come of 
intimacies with creation. That he may 



THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 15 

write a letter upon birchbark, that he may 
eat a mushroom from the broken elm- 
trunk and drink the blood of the maple, 
that he may woo a squirrel from the oak, 
a frog from the marsh, or even a twelve- 
tined buck from his fastness, to be 
caressed and fed, strikes him as an experi- 
ment, not as an honor. It will not do to 
say that the worship of the natural world 
is an adult passion : it is quite the con- 
trary; but only certain adults exemplify 
it. Coleridge, in the Biographia Littera- 
ria, has a very beautiful theory, and a 
profoundly true one. " To carry on the 
feelings of childhood into the powers of 
manhood ; to combine the child's sense 
of wonder and novelty with the appear- 
ances which every day, for perhaps forty 
years, have made familiar : 

" * With sun and moon and stars throughout the year. 
And man and woman, — ' 

this is the character and privilege of 
genius.'' The genuine faun-heart is the 
child conscious and retrieved, the child 
by law established in happy natures. I 
knew one boy of six who met an ugly 
gypsy in a lane, and who, on being asked 



1 6 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 

whether he would like to go and live 
with her, replied in Americanese, with 
slow-breathed transports : " Oh-ee, yup ! ** 
In his mind was an instant vision of a 
bed suspended among leaves ; and the 
clatter and glitter of the sacred leaves had 
nearly stolen his soul away. But he was 
not a common boy. His nurse being 
close behind, he was providentially saved, 
that time, to be abducted later by much 
more prosaic influences. Nor has the 
love of Nature, of late so laboriously 
instilled into the young, thanks to Froe- 
bel's impetus, made much progress among 
its small supposed votaries. The exam- 
ination-papers, which, in a lustier age, 
began with — "Who dragged Which 
around the walls of What ? " now stoop 
to other essentials : 

**The wood-spurge has a cup of three." 

Yet unless misled by the tender cant of 
their elders, even the modern Master and 
Missy would rather find and examine the 
gas-metre than the wood-spurge. 

In his best estate, the out-of-doorling 
hunts not, neither fishes : he simply 
moves or sits, in eternal amalgamation 



THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 17 

with the eternal : an enchanted toper of 
life and death, one with all that has ever 
been, or shall ever be, convinced that 
" there is a piece of divinity in us which 
is older than the elements, and owes no 
homage unto the sun." He is generally 
silent, because his sincere speech cannot 
be what we call sane. No one, however, 
who is truly content in the sought pres- 
ence of Nature, can be sure that it is she 
who gives him all, or even most, of his 
comfort. It is only the poetic fashion 
to say so. It is at least doubtful if 
Nature be not, in her last exquisiteness, 
for the man already independent of her. 
There are those who may accost her, not 
as a petitioner, but as one sovereign to 
another in a congress of the Powers. 
Moral poise is the true passport to her 
favor, not a fine eye for " the leopard- 
colored trees '' in late autumn, nor an ear 
for the bold diapasons of the surge. The 
man of vanities and ambitions and agitated 
fears may as well go to the football game : 
for the woods are cold to him. The 
lover, indeed, is notoriously rural while 
his fit lasts ; he has been known to float 
into a mosquito-marsh, obliviously reading 



1 8 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 

Tristram of Lyonnesse, But so oblique a 
cult as his can count for nothing with 
the Mother. Her favorite spite is to 
deepen melancholy, as her prayer and 
purpose are to enhance joy. Not pri- 
mary in her functions, she waits upon 
man's anterior dispositions, and gives her 
delights, as Fortuna is said to do, to the 
indifferent. But he shall not be indiffer- 
ent after : her praise drips, honey-bright, 
from his lip. If any question him, re- 
membering Vaughan's 

*' O tell me whence that joy doth spring 
Whose diet is divine and fair. 
Which wears Heaven like a bridal ring? '* 

he may say that it is the possessing love 
of Nature which makes his day so rich. 
She meanwhile, could put a gloss upon 
that plausible text. The order and peace 
in him had first subjugated her terrible 
heart. 

No babe, indeed, is born other than 
wild : he springs up on the farther border 
of civilization. Happy for him, if he can 
find his way back, with waking choice, even 
once a year, in his maturity, to recap- 
ture the perfect condition, and subject to it 



THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 19 

his own developed faculties. How many 
have suffered the pure epic homesick- 
ness, the longing for decivilization, which 
has drawn them "to discover islands 
far away," or to roam without purpose 
at all, like Alastor and the Scholar 
Gypsy ! Observe, that in all tradition the 
courtesies of the countryside are showered 
on the race of the deliberately glad. 
Magdalen of Pazzi, alone in the cloister- 
garden, rapturously catching up the roses 
to her face, and extolling Him who made 
them fair, signifies much : not only that 
she was dowered with the keen perception 
of beauty, — hardly that at all ; but that 
she was at the apex of moral sanity, 
which has as much right to be passionate 
with beauty as the sun itself. It is incon- 
ceivable that barbarians should admire the 
sunset : though it is not inconceivable 
that barbarians in good society should say 
that they do so. For one of the ear- 
marks of our latter-day culture is this 
patronal relish of the works of the Most 
High. Literature is over-ballasted with 
"descriptive passages," which the reader 
skips, but which no self-respecting author 
can afford to do without. We talk inces- 



20 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 

santly of the hills and the sea, and the 
flora and fauna thereof; and insolently 
take it for granted that we alone have ar- 
rived at the proper inwardness of these 
subjects. In naught have we more wronged 
the feudal ages than in denying to them 
an intimate knowledge and love of scenic 
detail. One glance at their cathedral 
capitals, at leaves, rose-haws, antlers, cob- 
webs, and shells, in stone carven since 
the tenth century, should have been cor- 
rective of that foolish depreciation of a 
people far nearer to the heart of things 
than we. The common dislike of gypsies 
is another revelation of jealousy : for we 
are not the Mother's favored children. 
Us she consigns to starched linen, and 
roofs, retorts of carbonic acid gas : would 
we sleep again on her naked breast, 
we come home to endure gibes, and the 
sniffles. 

Well may the " sylvan '* (a dear Eliza- 
bethan word gone into the dust-heap) 
feel that he is manumitted and exempt. 
He has no occasion to grow up. He 
looks with affectionate strangeness on his 
life past, as on his life to come, thinking 
it a solecism to anticipate decay where 



THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 21 

hitherto no decay has been^ or where in- 
deed, if it have been, he " has had the wit 
never to know it." The Heaven which 
lies around us in our infancy is always 
there afterwards, waiting in vain, for the 
most part, for reciprocations. Symbol- 
isms, sacraments, abound in the natural 
world, and to avail oneself of them is to 
regain and retain fleeting good, and to 
defy the time-dragon*s tooth with a smile 
as of immortality. Devotion to a black- 
berry pasture and a swimming-pool con- 
fers youth on the devotee, provided he 
has not to pick fruit nor rescue ribald 
little boys for a living. A travelled man, 
a man of the world, has a ripe expert 
look : one says of him, admiring his talk 
and his manners, that he bears his age 
with grace. But nothing is so ageless as 
a sailor : he can bear his age neither well 
nor ill, for the obvious reason. In his 
hard cheek and blue eye are innocence, 
readiness, zest, taciturnity, daring, shy- 
ness, truth : all the fine wild qualities 
which " they that sit in parlors never 
dream of." It is not a physiological fact 
alone, that for health's sake you must be 
in league with the open. Whoever clings 



22 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 

to it for love, is known by his superior 
simplicity and balance. Many a coast- 
guardsman, or scout in the Canadian for- 
est, has achieved the complete power 
which is mistakenly supposed to come, 
like an imposition of hands, upon the 
educated ; and he gets this inestimable 
accolade, mark you, merely by smelling 
sea-kelp and sassafras, and welcoming a 
rainstorm as a pleasant sort of fellow : by 
the exercise of sheer natural piety, whose 
processes turn about and hit back by 
keeping him young. Would you per- 
petrate an elfin joke on such a one, pre- 
sent him with a calendar : the urban and 
domestic accuser. To register time, and 
consult its phases scientifically, is to give 
it a deplorable advantage over you. A 
brook scoffs at birthdays: and many a 
violet errs in chronology, and sidles forth 
at Martinmas. It is the shepherd-boy in 
the Arcadia who " pipes as if he should 
never grow old " : marry, it is not any- 
body in a theatre orchestra ! Which, 
think you, died with her girlhood yet un- 
consumed within her, Madame Recamier 
or the Nut-brown Maid? The victory 
is not with cosmetics. To the soirees of 



THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 23 

the hermit thrush, tan is your only wear. 
The " sylvan " is anti-chronological. He 
who comes close to the heart-beat of 
progress and dissolution in the wilderness, 
the vicissitudes of the vegetable world, 
must feel that, save in an allegory, these 
things are not for him : they go under 
him as a swimmer's wave. " Change 
upon change : yet one change cries out to 
another, like the alternate seraphim, in 
praise and glory of their Maker." The 
human atom gets into the mood of the 
according leaf, caring not how long it has 
hung there, how soon it may fall. God's 
will, in short, is nowhere so plain and ac- 
ceptable as on a lonely stretch of moor or 
water. Who can feel it so keenly in the 
town ? The town has never allowed man 
to guess his superiority to it : creature of 
his own exaggerations, it cows him, and 
compels him to remember, in his unrest, 
that he is no longer a spirit, no longer a 
child. 

At Hampton Court, in the Great Hall, 
in the right lower corner of the rich pagan 
borderings of one of the Old Testament 
tapestries (that of the Circumcision of 
Isaac), there is a tiny delicate faded figure 



24 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 

of a ladj all in soft duns and dusty golds. 
He wears curious sandals ; a green chap- 
let is on his brows ; a hare hangs over his 
shoulder ; he carries a stocked quiver, and 
a spear. His look is one of sweet sensu- 
ous idleness and delight. He is centuries 
old, but to him the same sun is shining in 
the aromatic alleys of the forest. He 
does not know that there is a very fine 
Perpendicular roof over him, and he has 
never noticed the kings and their courts 
who have been blown away like smoke 
from before his path. The parent and 
the schoolmaster who sought him have 
also fallen to dust. But for him the hunt 
and the moist morning : for him the im- 
mortal pastoral life. We used to see him 
often, and we saw him once again, after a 
long interval. His charm was all that it 
had ever been : but at the encounter, he 
brought hot tears of envy to the eyes. 
All those years, those years of ours and 
the world's, wasted in prison on casuist 
industries, he had been at large with the 
wind, he had been playing ! How some 
of us have always meant to do just that 
for ever, and that only ! for why not do 
the sole thing one can do perfectly ? But 



THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 25 

an indoor demon, one Duty, a measly 
Eden-debarring angel armed with plati- 
tudes, has somehow clogged our career. 
Were it not for a cloud of responsibilities, 
a downpour of Things to Do, one might 
be ever at the other side of window-panes, 
and see Pan twelve hours a day. Ah, lit- 
tle Vita Silvestris ! Blamelessly may we 
feel that you have found the way, and that 
we have missed it, growing gray at the 
silly desk, and sure only of this : that 
presently we shall indeed find ourselves 
inside sycamore planks, so that all the 
dryads in their boles, watching our very 
best approximation to their coveted estate, 
shall smile to see. ' But thereafter, at least, 
and for good, we are where we belong, 
" sub dio, under the canopy of Heaven,'' 
and ready for the elemental game. 

1895. 



On the Ethics of Descent 



ON THE ETHICS OF 
DESCENT 



IT will never do for a biographer to 
look too narrowly into his hero's gen- 
ealogy ; for speculation is at all times fatal 
to an accepted pedigree. Every man 
is presumably deduced from male and 
female, from generation to generation ; 
and from these only. There is more of 
superstition than of science in this mode 
of reckoning : it has no great philosophic 
bearing, and it is very illiberal. The 
truth is, we belong, from the beginning, 
to many masters, and are unspeakably 
beholden to the forming hands of the 
phenomena of the universe, rather than to 
the ties of blood. What really makes 
one live, gives him his charter of rights, 
and clinches for him the significance with- 
out which he might as well be unborn, is, 
often enough, no human agency at all. 



30 



ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 



Where it happens to be human, it is 
glorious and attested : " I owe more to 
Philip, my father, than to Aristotle, my 
preceptor." 

But it may be debated that the climb- 
ing spider was considerably more to her 
appointed observer, Robert Bruce, than 
his own father ; inasmuch as she alone 
put heart into his body, and revivified 
him into the doer whose deeds we know. 
A moral relation like that, at the critical 
moment, establishes the ineffable bond ; 
annuls, as it were, every cause but the 
First, whereby the lesser causes arise ; 
and makes men over new. No mere 
soldiering Bruce, but the spider's Bruce, 
the victor of Scotland ; no mere Newton, 
but the dedicated heir of the falling apple 
and her laws ; no mere young rhetorician 
of Carthage, but Austin the saint, per- 
fected by the Tolle, lege, from Heaven. 
Many a word, many an event, has so, in 
the fullest sense, started a career, and set 
up a sort of paternity and authority over 
the soul. We are all "under influence,** 
both of the natural and the supernatural 
kingdom. Far from being the domestic 
product we take ourselves to be, we are 



ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 31 

strangely begotten of the unacknowledged, 
the fortuitous, and the impossible ; we 
lead lives of astonishing adventure, con- 
sort with eternity, and owe the thing we 
are to the most trivial things we touch. 
We are poor relations of every conceiv- 
able circumstance, alike of our sister the 
Fieudal System, and of our sister the rain- 
bow. We are interwoven, ages before 
our birth, and again and again after, with 
what we are pleased to call our accidents 
and our fates. 

" For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.*' 

There is real dutifulness in the recogni- 
tion of all this by the science of heraldry ; 
for heraldry exists but to commemorate 
some personal contact with marvels, and a 
generative occasion without which the race 
would not be itself; as if to reprove the 
boy who believes himself descended from 
Sir Magnifico, whose big shield hangs in 
the hall, and from nothing else in partic- 
ular. Sir Magnifico's cat may, in reality, 
account for the continuity of the house ; 
and a spindle or a vesper-bell come to the 
front in the history of its averted perils, 



32 ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 

and get handsomely quartered upon the 
baronial arms. But heraldry avails very 
little ; for she was always limited to the 
minority, and being old, has ceased to 
watch to-day and design for to-morrow, as 
she was wont. The best she can do is to 
suggest how it depends upon trifles and 
interferences whether we get here at all, or 
whether we cut a figure in the crowd ; and 
how foolish it is in us to scorn anything 
that happens. The road is long from 
Adam to his present estimable and innu- 
merable brood, and our past has been full 
of rescuing events. What has preserved 
us, under Providence, in the successive 
persons of our progenitors ? Clearly, 
more items than are easily numbered, or 
could be set down in symbols and devices 
on the escutcheon : so that it is well to 
maintain an attitude of great and general 
deference toward creation at large, for 
fear of not honoring our father and our 
mother. 

Stradella^s kinsfolk yet in Italy may 
know, or may not know, the hymn which 
once saved his life. They may pass over 
the hymn as a tiresome affair, necessary 
on holy-days, or they may look upon 



ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 33 

it as a lucky omen — how lucky ! — for 
them. But what they ought to do is to 
pay it excessive ancestral honors ; and 
canon law, the wide world over, would ac- 
quit them of the idolatry. Music, indeed, 
has been potent, first and last, in the 
crises of men. It becomes a factor of enor- 
mous importance in more than one history, 
if you search for it. Never do some of us 
hear that plaintive old song of Lockers, 
My Lodging is on the Cold Ground^ with- 
out thinking of James Radcliffe, third Earl 
of Derwentwater, who had apparently no 
connection with it, but whom one finds 
himself regarding as its very harmony 
forwarded into another age, like Arethusa 
stream returned from underground. Fresh 
from the composer's meditations, it was 
sung on the stage by the comely Moll 
Davies (said to be daughter to the Earl 
of Berkshire), before the notorious Per- 
sian person who then graced the English 
throne, and who was struck immediately 
with an excellence new as Locke's, and 
hardly of a contrapuntal nature. Time 
conjured up, from the bonnie comedian 
and the bad king, the innocent figure of 
a girl, Mary, who duly married a great 



34 ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 

noble, and vanished into history as the 
early-dying mother of the most stainless 
knight outside of a romance. Derwent- 
water was grandson, indeed, to vagabonds ; 
but was he not great-grandson to the 
sweetest of the fine arts ? His present 
representative, Lord Petre, may not openly 
refer one branch of his lineage to an origin 
which might seem more frankly fabulous 
than any divine descent of the ancients. 
At any rate, here is music of the seven- 
teenth century, going its operative chan- 
nel through imperfect humanity, and 
upspringing in the wild days of the 
Jacobite '15, into corporate beauty again: 
into a young life, dowered to the full with 
the strange winning charm of the Stuarts, 
and with a halo about it which they can 
scarcely boast. And therefore, reverting 
to " the source and spring of things," one 
is free to cry : " Well done. Master Mat- 
thew Locke, in F minor ! " which is in- 
deed reputed by tradition, the right heroic 
key. But who, writing of the darling of 
the legends of the North, will be bold 
enough to set My Lodging is on the Cold 
Ground in full song, on his genealogical 
tree ? James the First and Charles the 



ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 35 

First will be sure to show up there, and 
so will a number of other Britons not 
especially germane to the matter. This 
is how we forge pedigrees, in our blunt 
literal way, skipping over the vital forces, 
and laboriously reckoning the mediums 
and the tools of our own species. Any 
hard-headed encyclopedia will accredit an 
advocate of Ajaccio and his wife Letitia 
with the introduction into the nineteenth 
century of its most amazing man ; but to 
William Hazlitt, an expert among para- 
doxes, Bonaparte was " the child and 
champion " of the Revolution. 



2. 



Some Impressions from the Tudor 
Exhibition 



SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 



THE New Gallery on Regent Street, 
filled, at this time last year, with 
the memories of the Stuarts and with the 
graded grace of Vandyke and Lely, has 
taken a step backward into' history to show 
us a hardier and less enchanting society. 
The luckless, weak, romantic race are 
everlastingly dear, as Chopin cleverly said 
of his own music, to " the cognoscenti and 
the poets." But this present plunge into 
the sixteenth century is excellent cold 
water. The Stuarts are myths to these 
hard facts of Tudors, these strong-minded 
and dominant familiars, who destroyed, 
annexed, altered, and were deposed from 
nothing except from the Lord Pope's 
opinion of some of them. Everything 
here is wide-awake, matter-of-course, bra- 
cing : the spectator's mind tempers itself 



40 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

to the indicative present of Queen Bess, 

" to trampling horses' feet. 
More oft than to a chamber melody.'* 

The men and women on the walls are 
neither sophisticated nor complex. They 
are vehement in oath as in compliment, 
and hit at Fate straight from the shoulder. 
The best among them has a certain fierce 
zest of habit. Sidney and Sir Thomas 
More, each in his stainless soul, would have 
put the other in the pillory for blunders 
of piety. And such characters, with their 
stormy circumstance, their distinct homo- 
geneous look and mien, get to be fully 
understood. Nobody pretends to know 
the involutions of James the Second ; but 
bluff Hal is no riddle. Wolsey and 
Drake, Archbishop Parker and Anne 
Boleyn, even Shakespeare, are more com- 
prehensible units than, say. Dr. Donne, 
or the Duke of Monmouth. They stand 
in the red morning light, tangible as 
trees. They are the bread-and-cheese 
realities who have made English litera- 
ture, Enghsh policy and manners, Eng- 
lish religion. The heartbreak for Essex; 
that other heartbreak for Calais ; Wyatt's 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 41 

succoring cat; Raleigh's cloak in the 
mud ; Sidney's cup of water ; — 

" Battle nor song can from oblivion save. 
But Fame upon a w^hite deed loves to build : 
From out that cup of water Sidney gave, 
Not one drop has been spilled ! 

Christina of Milan's reply to her suitor, 
the asking and axeing monarch : " Had 
I a second head in reserve, sire, I might 
dare to become your wife ; " — all these are 
nursery tales, the very fibre of our earliest 
memory, as of our adult speculation. Old 
friends, these painted folk ! You look at 
them on canvases which Evelyn admired 
at Weybridge ; which Pepys longed to 
buy ; to which Horace Walpole provided 
a date and a name ; which brushed Ben 
Jonson and Carew passing towards the 
masques of Whitehall ; which have seen 
change and the shadow of change, and are 
themselves ever richer for the remembered 
eyes which have looked up at them, dur- 
ing three hundred years. 

As you glance from the entrance of the 
New Gallery, this London January of 
1890, the first thing to take the eye is a 
loan from Hampton Court, the full-length 



42 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

of the pioneer poet, Henry Howard, Earl 
of Surrey : a young powerful figure all in 
red, poised on a hill-top above a vexed 
white-and-blue sky. He steps forward 
there, as if in dramatic confirmation of the 
little known of his proud, obstinate, dis- 
interested career, straight through love, 
scholarship, adventure, to the Tower axe. 
One can hardly look at this stripling, with 
his jewelled cap's white blown feather, and 
hands laid airily but meaningly on hip and 
hilt, without remembering the most jocose 
and off-hand of his verses, written in the 
spring : 

" When I felt the air so pleasant round about. 
Lord ! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten 
out.*' 

This is No. 73, the authorship of it 
hanging undetermined between Holbein 
and Gwillim Stretes. No. 51, a famous 
and much-reproduced portrait of Surrey 
under an archway, is certainly Stretes' ; 
but you covet this other for " Hans the 
Younger." Its vistas are not uncharac- 
teristic of him ; and what a daring bugle- 
blast of color it is ! Masterfully does it 
light the room, and call you into the 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 43 

Tudor company, and make you glad, 
likewise, that you have "gotten out." It 
is great so to find a certain Howard, which 
is a possible Holbein, the key-note of 
this exhibition. And the race crops out 
on the walls every here and there, mak- 
ing trouble in your thoughts, as once in 
thoughts long quieted. They are shown 
thus contemporaneously, from " Jocky of 
Norfolk '* to the Philip who died for con- 
science' sake in the Beauchamp Tower; 
and wherever they are, there is a free wind, 
a rebel sunshine. Roam about a little ; 
and you return with gratification to these 
lean, tense, greyhound personalities. The 
visitor wearies of the Fidei Defensor, the 
much-connected-by-marriage, and of the 
kinsmen and servants, the Brandons and 
Cromwells, who flatter him by fat approxi- 
mate resemblance, and of the same dimly- 
recurrent aspect in the timid burgess 
noblewomen of the hour ; so that his first 
and last impressions are fain to spring 
from the spectacle of these firm-chinned 
soldierly Howards, thin and bright as 
their own swords, with the conscious look 
of gentlemen among cads. From the 
dazzle of history it is a bit difficult, at 



44 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

first, to turn the inward eye upon art 
alone. But it is Hans Holbein whom 
we have really come to see. And he is 
here in his plenary pomp : in chalk draw- 
ings, miniatures in hone-stone, burnt 
wood, and enamel, and in easel-pictures 
of every sort. 

No. 42, in the West Gallery, is an im- 
mense cartoon with outlines pricked, made 
for a fresco in the old Whitehall, com- 
prising a life-sized group of the two 
Henries and their respective queens, the 
estate of only one of whom, had, as the 
modern world knows, finality. It dates 
from the twenty-seventh year of the reign 
of Henry the Eighth. His admirable 
housekeeper of a father, long dead, is, as 
in Lord Braye's comely picture (No. ^^), 
a white-haired, mild, austerely gracious 
presence, at physical variance, at every 
point, from his burly heir. The latter 
stands a calif our chon, well to the front, his 
arms akimbo : a figure familiar to us as 
the alphabet, and with the force and value 
of spoken truth. There are many authen- 
tic Holbein portraits of the King in this 
collection, and their unanimity is without 
parallel. In the masterpiece labelled No. 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 



45 



1265 Waagen "finds a brutal egotism, an 
obstinacy and a harshness of feeling such 
as I have never yet seen in any human 
countenance. In the eyes, too, there is 
the suspicious watchfulness of a wild beast; 
so that I became quite uncomfortable from 
looking at it." Holbein's greedy instinct 
for form wreaks itself on Henry's charac- 
teristic contours : everywhere you recog- 
nize the puffy flesh, the full jaw and beady 
eyes, the level close-shaven head ; and, 
more than all, the round, protuberant, 
malformed chin, like an onion set in the 
thin growth of carroty beard. Other art- 
ists slur over that ugly Httle chin, but not 
the man from Augsburg. Hardly do 
the elaborations of embroidered doublets 
and jewelled surcoats with barrel sleeves, 
laughably misplaced on this hogshead 
Majesty, give the great court-painter such 
easy pleasure in the handling. Yet as 
Vandyke, 

*' Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,'* 

Is prone to temper the commonplace to 
his chivalrous ideals ; as Sir Joshua " sees 
partially, slightly, tenderly, catches the 
flying lights of things, the momentary 



46 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

glooms, paints also partially, tenderly, 
never with half his strength," — so here 
is one too much bent on his accuracy 
and his reporter's conscience. Nobody 
who has seen these thirty or more versions 
of the hero of matrimony according to 
Holbein, will ever forget his power in 
clinching an impression. High, low, 
east, west, straddles the royal Harry : a 
magnificent piece of pork, arrayed like 
Solomon in all his glory. There is no 
contradiction from first to last ; the testi- 
mony is not patched. No historiographer, 
in face of them, has any option to think 
of Henry but as Holbein's brush thought 
of him. Mr. Froude is hereby check- 
mated : his idol crumbles. The perfectly 
square florid countenance, the Httle crowded 
features, the indomitable leer under the 
flat hat and feather, the expanding velvets, 
the sturdy calves of which their owner was 
vain, the whole air of an aggressive and 
successful personality, — these are your 
statistics, " State papers," as Hazlitt once 
happily called them. They do not allege ; 
they convict. This, they seem to say, is 
he who celebrated his wedding on his old 
love's burial-day, who sacrificed the truest 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 47 

liegemen in his islands, and who made war 
on the architecture of monastic England 
in a maintained fit of crazy and vulgar 
spite. The ornate No. 55 is also a terri- 
fic " human document." Yet the special 
plea, for all that, is not fair; it is only as 
ifair as Holbein can make it. He had not 
the centrifugal mind. To look before 
and after is not his wont. The royal 
sitter is impeached unjustly. 

" Tell Isabel the Queen I looked not thus. 
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France." 

Was this the mirror of chivalry in his 
youth ? the handsome Henry of joust 
and debate, who walked by choice with 
thinking men, in an atmosphere of Chris- 
tian statecraft and the fine arts ? he who 
wrote devotional essays, and composed 
winning music ? If so, that Henry has no 
survival here. Something of him must 
have lingered about the later aspect of the 
tyrant King, as good is sure to do wherever 
its shrine has been ; but Holbein failed 
(for we cannot think he refused) to bear 
it witness. 

It is pleasant to find Holbein himself 
looking from No. 52 : a noble portrait, in 



48 SOME IMPRESSIONS EROM 

distemper, from his own hand, in his 
prime. It makes one revert, however, to 
the prior Holbein, also done by himself, 
now in the Museum at Basle : a sweet 
sketch, which, judged by the face alone, 
could instantly be relegated to the era 
where it belongs, that of the dawn of 
humanism. There, the straight hair has 
yet a soft ring or two over the brow ; the 
mouth is sensitive, but ironic ; the young 
neck full of power ; the eyebrows diversely 
arched, as if in a passing press of thought ; 
the whole mien already suggests, as Wolt- 
man says, " seriousness and mental superi- 
ority." This picture before us is very 
splendid, but it is not so reassuring. 
Holbein's body-color at Berlin, of the 
chunk-headed, thick-bearded, small-eyed 
Englishman, — a miracle of a drawing, — 
may be accepted as the crass original John 
Bull. With all manner of exception in 
favor of the painter, Holbein was rather 
that sort of a man. His work had the 
warrant of his genius : what he saw was 
what his whole habit fitted him to see. 
Each century has its own casts of physiog- 
nomy, greatly accentuated once by the pas- 
sive individuality, now, alas, vanished, of 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 49 

costume. There seem to have been, in 
Holbein's day, but two physical values : 
the grave, alert, " sunnily-ascetic " men, 
who were dissatisfied with the time ; and 
the able bold time-servers, who kept their 
flesh upon them, and their peace. Henry 
himself, at his best, was the second type, 
as Erasmus was the first. It is with a 
sigh of relief that one turns from the 
imperious presence which chases you 
through the West Gallery, and " lards the 
lean earth as he walks along," to confront, 
in another room, the memorials of his 
little son. 

Of these, there are some sixteen por- 
traits, exclusive of the drawings, and five 
of them are from Holbein's hand. The 
half-length lent by the Earl of Yarborough, 
No. 174, shows a charming child with a 
great hat tied under his chin; No. 182, 
Lord Petre's, is a spirited bust on a misty 
green ground ; in No. 190, a gem of the 
first water, belonging to the Earl of Den- 
bigh's collection, the Prince stands, lovely 
as a lily, habited in white and cloth-of- 
gold, with a long fur-lined crimson sur- 
coat, his slender beautifully-modelled hand 
closed on a dagger. The family beauty 



50 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

begins and ends with Edward, in his grave 
at sixteen ; there is no Edward, by Hol- 
bein, older than six. As usual, the master 
draws you from his own art to the root 
of the thing before you, even as he drew 
Ruskin from counting his skeleton's clack- 
ing ribs in the Dance of Death : and 
forthwith you begin speculating on the 
moral qualities of the royal bud, "the 
boy-patron of boys." There is no deny- 
ing that he looks like Another. Yes, 
he is very Henry-the-Eighthy ! when 
you study him at short range. And he 
had a unique talent, you suddenly remem- 
ber, for signing the death-warrants of 
uncles. Princess Mary, from the same 
hand, is decorously dressed; she has flat 
hair and brown eyes. Acid and dismal 
as she is, you would say at once of her, 
that she is sincere, — sine cera, without 
wax. She also resembles a parent : but it 
is Katharine of Aragon. No. 94 (one 
mentally thanks Mr. Huth for a sight of 
it in the original ! ) is the warmest thing in 
the room : the famous portrait of Sir 
Thomas More. The nap of his claret 
velvet sleeves appears never to have lost 
a particle of its lustre. One knows not 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 51 

which to admire the most in this picture : 
the breadth of composition, the precision 
and sweep of line, or the spiritual dignity 
and repose. Its mate, the half-length of 
Sir John More, the father, Senior Judge 
of the King's Bench, " homo civilis^ suavis^ 
innocens^' is very nearly as superb, though 
it has less body. Both were done by 
Holbein during his happy stay at Chelsea. 
His presentation of More is always in- 
estimable : you recognize, by some little 
accent ever and anon, that he painted 
him with enjoyment and understanding 
love. " Thy painter, dearest Erasmus," 
wrote More, "is an amazing artist." It 
was on a hint of the Earl of Arundel that 
Holbein went to England. When asked 
there who had persuaded him to cross the 
Channel, he could not remember the 
nobleman's name, though he remembered 
his face : one turn of the pen, and the 
answer was apparent. But it was Erasmus 
who gave him his letters of introduction, 
who was in reality his patron ; for Erasmus 
sent him to More, and from the Chan- 
cellor's roof he passed to that of the King, 
at an honorarium of three hundred pounds 
a year. And as he painted these friends. 



52 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

so he painted their colleagues : with sym- 
pathy and authority. Our most intimate 
knowledge of the finer spirits among the 
publicists of the sixteenth century comes 
from Holbein's canvas. We cannot fail 
to observe " the weight of thought and 
care in these studious heads of the Refor- 
mation." Such a weight is in every Hol- 
bein of Colet and Warham and More, of 
Melanchthon, Froben, Erasmus himself, 
(borne in him, as in More, with an almost 
whimsical sweetness), and of " the thor- 
oughly Erasmic being," Bonifacius Amer- 
bach. Looking at them, and mindful of 
their diverse sagacities, one must corrobo- 
rate the celebrated wish of Goethe that 
the business of the Reformation, spoiled, 
as a work of art, by Luther and Calvin, 
and as a theological issue, by the popular 
interference, had been left to the trained 
leaders : to men Hke these in one gen- 
eration, and to men like Pole and Hugo 
Grotius in the next ! 

Wolsey and the great and quietly-handled 
Archbishop Warham hang here together in 
strange posthumous amity, parted only by 
the panel of Anne, Bluebeard's fourth 
Queen, which Holbein went to Cleves to 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 53 

paint. A very undistinguished person No. 
108 must have been, quite worthy of her 
safe suburban pensioner's life, and the 
humorous commuting title of the King's 
Sister. All her forerunners and successors 
are here to the life, limned by Holbein's 
brush and pencil. The dearth of female 
beauty, from 1509 to 1547, was truly 
extraordinary, if we are to believe the 
believable pigments before us. The 
women of the court have the fullest pos- 
sible representation, with the adjunct of 
exceptionally picturesque, though stiff, 
attire. But among them all, it would be 
a hard task to bestow the apple upon the 
belle, for a reason quite other than any 
known to Paris on Ida. Even Anne 
Boleyn, full-lipped and gay, has but an 
upper-housemaid prettiness. It is small 
compensation that most of them were 
learned. The best female portrait, ad- 
mirably hung, is No. 92 : the young 
Duchess of Milan, in Holbein's latest 
and largest manner. The demure girl, 
set in novel blacks and whites of her 
widow's mourning, posed with consum- 
mate simplicity, has always an admiring 
crowd in front of her. Wornum's critical 



54 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

last word echoes : it is " a stupendous 
picture." But the Duchess might be 
Lancelot Gobbo's sweetheart, so far as 
the actual bearing and expression are con- 
cerned. No wonder that the fright Glo- 
riana passed for all that was comely and 
thoroughbred ! Could it be that her sub- 
jects had no loftier criterion in the mem- 
ory of their own mothers ? 

The fine flower of the picture depart- 
ment of the Tudor Exhibition is the 
Queen's loan from Windsor Library : 
eighty-nine drawings on tinted paper, 
ranged on the screens of the West and 
South Galleries. Queen Caroline, in 
George the Second's time, found them 
in a Kensington Palace cupboard, and 
had them framed. (We know nothing 
else so nice of that bore of a martyr.) 
Behold Holbein's methods running free ! 
In decisive and rapid chalk lines, with a 
mere suggestion of color, or a touch, here 
and there, of India ink, he gives us his 
English contemporaries : some in play- 
ful perfection commended to posterity, as 
a matter of a dozen conscientious touches. 
How he delights in a hollow cheek, a 
short silken beard, an outstanding ear, 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 55 

or the hair sprouting oddly on the 
temples ! Despite his uncompromising 
truth of locality, the result is often of 
astounding delicacy : notably in the heads 
of Lords Clinton and Vaux, and that of 
Prince Edward. Most of these Windsor 
sheets are studies for pictures ; and thus 
we have Holbein's splendid roll of familiar 
faces over again ; but that of Sir John 
Godsalve is complete, and in body-colors, 
of grand breadth and tone. The cata- 
logue names were affixed much later, and 
are not perfectly trustworthy : but those 
indicated as Sir Harry Guilford, the Rus- 
sells. Earls of Bedford, the Howards, 
Lord Wentworth, Sir Thomas Eliott, and 
John Poins (the latter overbrimming with 
individual force), lead in interest and tech- 
nique. No. 514, the scholarly and lova- 
ble Eliott, is perhaps the thing one would 
choose, of all here, to win Holbein the 
admiration of those who have yet to ap- 
preciate him. Its refined finish and bold 
conception are in unique balance. Sir 
Thomas Eliott, in half profile, is grave and 
plain. But whoever likes to pay homage 
to intelligent human goodness, will dehght 
in this report of him. You feel that 



56 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

Rembrandt would have turned from his 
cloudless, treeless tableland of a counte- 
nance ; and that such as Sir Peter Lely 
would have found him cryptic enough, 
and so smothered him in ultramarine dra- 
peries. But among Holbein's men, after 
the Jorg Gyze (1532) in the Museum at 
Berlin, the Hubert Morett in the Dresden 
Gallery (1537), and the Young Man with 
a Falcon (1542) in the Gallery of the 
Hague, after his immortal major achieve- 
ments, in short, one might rank this little 
unshaded frost-fine drawing of Sir Thomas 
Eliott, a sitter placed forever on this side 
of death. 

But the ladies, again, in their close 
bodices and triangular head-dresses, gen- 
erally come off second-best. Holbein's 
elemental candor befitted them not. Fail- 
ing to be themselves in full, they are 
more or less Elisabeth-Schmiddy ! tinct- 
ured with reminiscences of the artist's 
muddy-tempered Hausfrau at home in 
Basle. The one quality they cannot con- 
vey is breeding, social distinction. Hol- 
bein's v/oman may have youth, goodness, 
capacity, even authority ; but 

" Was the lady such a lady ? " 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 57 

You miss the aroma of manners. The 
mystery of sex is absent, too : a thing 
the Florentines never missed, and which 
Gainsborough and Romney found it im- 
possible not to convey. When you see 
Holbein's men, you wish you had known 
them ; but his women merely remind you 
that he was a very great painter. It is 
well to remember, nevertheless, that he 
had no very great woman to paint : no 
such patroness, for instance, as " Anne, 
Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery." 
His organ-hand does what it can for souls 
frangible as lutes. Wherever there is sin- 
cerity, kindness, or a brave soul, wherever 
there is sagacity or thought in these Tudor 
faces, their delineator makes it tell. Did 
the she-visionaries, if there were any rich 
enough to engage Holbein, did the per- 
sons born in Hawthorne's " brown twilight 
atmosphere," habitually avoid his stu- 
dio ? No kirtled aristocracy of any age 
or country was ever so flat and dozy. 
Surrey occupied himself in scorning " the 
new men " of his day ; and it is conceiv- 
able that new men abounded, to fill the 
places depopulated by the Wars of the 
Roses, when all that was gallant and sig- 



58 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 

niiicant in the upper ranks, seemed, in 
one way or another, to have gone under. 
But the Wars of the Roses touched not 
the female succession in the ducal and 
baronial houses : and the wonder remains 
that Honthorst and Vandyke just after 
Holbein, and Jan de Mabuse just before 
him, could have found, among English 
maids and wives, the lofty graces which 
he never saw. Exceptions might be 
made, however, in favor of Elizabeth, 
Lady Rich ; for " high-erected thought '* 
is bodily manifest in her, as in the dark- 
eyed Lady Lister, and in Lady Surrey, 
a sweet patient good woman who had 
known tears. Lady Butts is pleasingly 
modern. At what four-to-six has one 
met her ? All the ladies of the More 
family are alluring acquaintances ; and no 
one is to be envied who does not declare 
for Lady Richmond, with her absurd cap 
and feather, the big water-drop-shaped 
pearls in her ears, the downcast lids, and 
that delicious, kissable, cheerful mouth ! 

Our famous old friend, the great sov- 
ereign who saw fit to box the ears of 
offending gentlemen, and make war upon 
their wives, possesses the North Gallery. 



THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 59 

Pale, beaked, sinister; amiably shrewd, 
like Becky Sharp ; now as a priggish 
infant with a huge watery head, anon as 
a parrot-like old woman ; here with dogs 
frisking about her, and there with a grim- 
ace which would scatter a pack of dogs to 
the four winds j| always swathed in inex- 
pressible finery, Elizabetha Dei Gratia 
Regina arises on the awed spectator's eye. 
Her vanities were fairly inherited from 
her straddling sire. Any authentic por- 
trait of her is a mass of fluff and sparkle, 
an elaborate cobweb several feet square, 
in which, after much search and many 
barricades • of haberdashery surmounted, 
you shall light upon the spectral spider 
who inhabits them. 1 1 There is nothing 
much more entertaining in this world 
than a study of the royal and virginal 
wardrobe. Those were epic clothes ! 
They defy analysis, from the geyser of 
lace circling the neck and ears in a dozen 
cross-currents, to the acute angles of the 
diamonded, rubied stomacher, and the 
stiff acre of petticoat. They brought 
employment and money to artists, who 
painted in the significant occupant as they 
could, and they serve to illustrate for 



6o THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 

ever the science of dress-making, whose 
heraldic shield should bear Eve couchant 
on one side, and Elizabeth rampant on 
the other. In the balcony above is No. 
484, an appalling picture of Her Majesty, 
in a ruff like isinglass. When we recall 
that, grown old, she had all her mirrors 
broken, and all paintings of herself which 
were not liars destroyed, what must have 
been the terrors of that countenance for 
which such a copy as this proved suffi- 
ciently flattering ! Despite Zucchero, 
Hilliard, and Pourbus, he is the wisest 
man alive who knows how that illustrious 
lady really looked. And as you glance 
about, be it on the first visit or the twen- 
tieth, full of optical and consequent his- 
torical bewilderment ; as you see how 
to right and left of Queen Bess the hosts 
of that wonderful reign have gathered 
again, you become keenly aware that 
one who died in the parish of S. Andrew 
Undershaft, in 1543, "should have died 
hereafter." Hunger for that bygone 
genius is in your thought there : O for an 
hour of Hans Ho, pinxit ! 

1890. 



On the Delights of an Incognito 



ON THE DELIGHTS OF AN 
INCOGNITO 



PERFECT happiness, which we pre- 
tend is so difficult to get at, lies at 
either end of our sentient pole : in be- 
ing intimately recognized, or else in evad- 
ing recognition altogether. An actor 
finds it inspiring to step forth from the 
wings, steeled cap-a-pie in self-conscious- 
ness, before a great houseful of enthusiastic 
faces and hands ; but if he ever knows a 
moment yet more ecstatic, it is when he 
is alone in the hill-country, swimming in 
a clear pool, and undemonstratable as 
human save by his habiliments hanging 
on a bush, and his dog, sitting on the 
margin under, doubtfully eyeing now 
these, now the unfamiliar large white fish 
which has shed them. Thackeray once 
said that the purest satisfaction he ever 
took, was in hearing one woman name 



64 ON THE DELIGHTS 

him to another as the author of Vanity 
FaiVy while he was going through a ragged 
and unbookish London lane. It is at 
least as likely that Aristides felt pleasure 
in accosting his own ostracizer, and help- 
ing him to ruin the man whom he was 
tired of hearing called The Just. And 
the young Charles the Second, between 
his defeat at Worcester, and his extraordi- 
nary escape over sea, was able to report, 
with exquisite relish, the conduct of that 
honest Hambletonian, who " dranke a 
goode glass of beare to me, and called me 
Brother Roundhead." To be indeed the 
King, and to masquerade as Will Jones, 
alias Jackson, " in a green cloth jump coat 
and breeches worn to shreds," in Pepys' 
sympathetic detail, with "little rolls of 
paper between his toes," and "a long 
thorn stick crooked three or four several 
ways " in his artificially-browned hand, 
has its dangers ; but it is the top, never- 
theless, of mundane romance and felicity. 
In fact, there is no enjoyment compar- 
able to walking about "unwept, unhon- 
ored, and unsung," once you have become, 
through your misfortune rather than your 
fault, ever so little of a public personage. 



OF AN INCOGNITO 65 

Lucky was the good Haroun Al Rasch- 
id, inasmuch as, being duly himself by 
day, he could stroll abroad, and be im- 
measurably and magnificently himself by 
night. Nothing but duty dragged him 
back from his post of spectator and specu- 
lator at the street-corner, to the narrow 
concrete humdrum of a throne. But 
there are, and have always been, in every 
age, men of genius who cling to the big 
cloak and the dark lantern, and who 
travel pseudonymously from the cradle 
to the grave ; who keep apart, meddle 
not at all, have only distant and general 
dealings with their kind, and, in an inno- 
cent and endearing system of thieving, 
come to understand and explain every- 
thing social, without being once under- 
stood or explained themselves, or once 
breaking an inviolable privacy. 

" Not even the tenderest heart and next our own. 
Knows half the reason why we smile or sigh." 

The arrangement is excellent : it induces 
and maintains dignity. Most of us who 
suffer keenly from the intolerable burden 
of self, are grateful to have our fits of 
sanity by the hour or the week, when we 
5 



66 ON THE DELIGHTS 

may eat lotos and fern-seed, and die out 
of the ken of The Evening Bugaboo. To 
be clear of mortal contact, to resolve into 
grass and brooks, to be a royal nobody, 
with the dim imbecile spectrum taken to 
be you, by your acquaintanceship, tempo- 
rarily hooted out of existence, is the 
privilege which the damned on a Saratoga 
piazza are not even blest enough to groan 
for. " Oh," cried Hazlitt, heartily inhal- 
ing liberty at the door of a country inn, 
after a march, " Oh, it is great to shake 
off the trammels of the world and public 
opinion, to lose our importunate, tor- 
menting, everlasting personal identity in 
the elements of Nature, and to become 
the creature of the moment clear of all 
ties ; to hold to" the universe only by a 
dish of sweetbreads, and to owe nothing 
but the score of the evening ; and, no 
longer seeking for applause or meeting 
with contempt, to be known by no other 
title than The Gentleman in the Parlour." 
Surely, surely, to be Anonymous is better 
than to be Alexander, and to have no 
care is a more sumptuous wealth than 
to have sacked ten cities. Sweetly has 
Cowley said it, in his little essay on 



OF AN INCOGNITO 6-] 

Obscurity : " Bene qui latuit, bene vixit : 
he lives well, that has lain well hidden ; 
in which, if it be a truth, I '11 swear the 
world has been sufficiently deceived. For 
my part, I think it is ; and that the pleas- 
antest condition of life is in incognito. . . . 
It is, in my mind, a very delightful pas- 
time for two good and agreeable friends 
to travel up and down together, in places 
where they are by nobody known, nor 
know anybody. It was the case of ^neas 
and his Achates, when they walked in- 
visibly about the fields and streets of 
Carthage. Venus herself 

** * A veil of thickened air around them cast. 

That none might know or see them as they passed.' " 

The atmosphere was so liberally allowed, 
in the Middle Ages, to be thick with 
spirits, that the subject arose in the de- 
bates of the schools whether more than a 
thousand and fifty-seven of them could 
execute a saraband on the point of a 
needle. We are not informed by what 
prior necessity they desired to dance ; but 
something, after all, must be left to the 
imagination. Dancing, in their case, must 
be, as with lambs and children, the spon- 



68 ON THE DELIGHTS 

taneous witness of light hearts ; and what 
is half so likely to make a shade whimsi- 
cally frolicsome, as the sense of his own 
absolute intangibility in our world of 
wiseacres and mind-readers and myopic 
Masters of Arts ? To watch, to listen, 
to know the heretofore and the hereafter, 
and to be at the same time dumb as a 
nail, and skilful at dodging a collision 
with flesh and blood, must be, when you 
come to think of it, a delightful vocation 
for ghosts. It is, then, in some sort, an- 
ticipatory of part of our business in the 
twenty-sixth century of the Christian era, 
to becloud now our name and nativity, 

^^^' *' Beholding, unbeheld of all/' 

to move musingly among strange scenes, 
with the charity and cheerfulness of those 
delivered from death. I am told that L. 
R. had once an odd spiritual adventure, 
agreeable and memorable, which demon- 
strated how much pleasure there is to be 
had out of these moods of detachment 
and non-individuality. He had spent 
the day at a library desk, and had grown 
hazy with no food and much reading. 
As he walked homeward in the evening, 



OF AN INCOGNITO 69 

he felt, for sheer buoyancy of mind, like 
that thin Greek who had to fill his pock- 
ets with lead, for fear of being blown 
away by the wind. It happened that he 
was obliged to pass, on the way to his 
solitary lodging of the night, the house 
where he was eternally the expected guest : 
the house of one with whom and with 
whose family he was on a most open and 
affectionate footing. Their window-shades 
were drawn, not so low but that he could 
see the shining dinner-table dressed in its 
pomp, and the little ring of merry faces 
closing it in. There was S., the bonniest 
of wives, smiling, in her pansy-colored 
gown, with a pearl comb in her hair : and 
opposite her was little S., in white, busy 
with the partridge ; and there was A. H., 
the jolly artist cousin ; and, facing the 
window at the head of his own conclave, 
{quos inter Augustus recumhens purpurea 
bibit ore nectar l^^ sat dear O., with his 
fine serious genial head bobbing over 
the poised carving-knife, as he demol- 
ished, perhaps, some quoted sophism of 
Schopenhauer. There were welcome and 
warmth inside there for R. : how well he 
knew it ! But the silent day just over 



JO DELIGHTS OF AN INCOGNITO 

had laid a spell upon his will ; he looked 
upon them all, in their bright lamplight, 
like any vagrant stranger from the street, 
and hurried on, never quite so paradoxi- 
cally happy in his life as when he quitted 
that familiar pane without rapping, and 
went back to the dark and the frost, un- 
apprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit 
among men. 

1893. 



The Puppy : A Portrait 



THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 



HE is the sixty-sixth in direct descent, 
and his coat is like amber damask, 
and his blue eyes are the most winning 
that you ever saw. They seem to pro- 
claim him as much too good for the 
vulgar world, and worthy of such zeal 
and devotion as you, only you, could give 
to his helpless infancy. And, with a bless- 
ing upon the Abbot of Clairvaux, who 
is popularly supposed to have invented 
his species, you carry him home from the 
Bench show, and in the morning, when 
you are told that he has eaten a yard and 
a quarter of the new stair-carpet, you look 
into those dreamy eyes again : no re- 
proach shall reach him, you swear, because 
you stand forevermore between. And 
he grows great in girth, and in character 
the very chronicle and log-book of his 
noble ancestry ; he may be erratic, but he 



74 THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 

puts charm and distinction into everything 
he does. Your devotedness to his welfare 
keeps him healthful and honest, and ab- 
surdly partial to the squeak of your boots, 
or the imperceptible aroma which, as it 
would seem, you dispense, a mile away. 
The thing which pleases you most is his 
ingenuous childishness. It is a fresh little 
soul in the rogue's body : 

** Him Nature giveth for defence 
His formidable innocence." 

You see him touch pitch every day, 
associating with the sewer-building Italians, 
with their strange oaths ; with affected 
and cynical " sales-ladies " in shops (she 
of the grape-stall being clearly his too- 
seldom-relenting goddess) ; and with the 
bony Thomas-cat down street, who is an 
acknowledged anarchist, and whose infre- 
quent suppers have made him sour-com- 
plexioned towards society, and " thereby 
disallowed him," as dear Walton would 
say, "to be a competent judge." But 
Pup loses nothing of his sweet congenital 
absent-mindedness ; your bringing-up sits 
firmly upon him and keeps him young. 
He expands into a giant, and such as meet 



THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 75 

him on a lonely road have religion until 
he has passed. Seven, nine, ten months 
go over his white-hooded head ; and 
behold, he is nigh a year old, and still 
Uranian. He begins to accumulate facts, 
for his observation of late has not been 
unscientific ; but he cannot generalize, 
and on every first occasion he puts his 
foot in it. A music-box transfixes him ; 
the English language, proceeding from a 
parrot in a cage, shakes his reason for days. 
A rocking-horse on a piazza draws from 
him the only bad word he knows. He 
sees no obligation to respect persons with 
mumps, or with very red beards, or with 
tools and dinner-pails ; in the last instance, 
he acts advisedly against honest labor, as 
he perceives that most overalls have kicks 
in them. Following Plato, he would 
reserve his haughty demeanor for slaves 
and servants. Moreover, before the un- 
demonstrated he comes hourly to a pause. 
If a wheelbarrow, unknown hitherto among 
vehicles, approach him from his suburban 
hill, he is aware of the supernatural ; but 
he will not flinch, as he was wont to do 
once ; rather will he stand four-square, 
with eyebrows and crinkled ears vocal 



76 THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 

with wonder and horror. Then the man 
back of the moving bulk speaks over his 
truck to you, in the clear April evening : 
" Begorra, 't is his furrust barry ! " and 
you love the man for his accurate affec- 
tionate sense of the situation. When Pup 
is too open-mouthed and curious, when he 
dilates, in fact, with the wrong emotion, it 
reflects upon you, and reveals the flaws in 
your educational system. He blurts out 
dire things before fine ladies. If he hear 
one of them declaiming, with Delsarte ges- 
tures, in a drawing-room, he appears in the 
doorway, undergoing symptoms of acutest 
distress, and singing her down, professedly 
for her own sake ; and afterward he pities 
her so, and is so chivalrously drawn toward 
her in her apparent aberration, that he lies 
for hours on the flounce of her gown, eyeing 
you, and calumniating you somewhat by 
his vicarious groans and sighs. But ever 
after. Pup admits the recitation of tragic 
selections as one human folly more. 

He is so big and so unsophisticated, 
that you daily feel the incongruity, and 
wish, in a vague sort of way, that there 
was a street boarding-school in your town, 
where ,he could rough it away from an 



THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 



n 



adoring family, and learn to be responsi- 
ble and self-opinionated, like other dogs. 
He has a maternal uncle, on the estate 
across the field : a double-chinned tawny 
ogre, good-natured as a baby, and utterly 
rash and improvident, whose society you 
cannot covet for your tender charge. One 
fine day. Pup is low with the distemper, 
and evidence is forthcoming that he has 
visited, under his uncle's guidance, the 
much-deceased lobster thrown into hotel 
tubs. After weeks of anxious nursing, 
rubbings in oil, and steamings with vinegar, 
during which time he coughs and wheezes 
in a heartbreaking imitation of advanced 
consumption, he is left alone a moment 
on his warm rug, with the thermometer in 
his special apartment steady at seventy- 
eight degrees, and plunges out into the 
winter blast. Hours later, he returns; and 
the vision of his vagabond uncle, slinking 
around the house, announces to you in 
what companionship he has been. Plas- 
tered to the skull in mud and icicles, wet 
to the bone, jaded, guilty, and doomed 
now, of course, to die. Pup retires behind 
the kitchen table. The next morning he 
is well. The moral, to him at least, is 



78 THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 

that our uncle is an astute and unappre- 
ciated person, and a genuine man of the 
world. 

Yet our uncle, with all his laxity, has 
an honorable heart, and practises the 
maxima reverentia puero. It is not from 
him that Pup shall learn his little share of 
iniquity. Meanwhile, illumination is near- 
ing him in the shape of a little old white 
bull-terrier of uncertain parentage, with 
one ear, and a scar on his neck, and de- 
pravity in the very lift of his stumped tail. 
This active imp, recently come to live in 
the neighborhood, fills you with forebod- 
ings. You know that Pup must grow 
up sometime, must take his chances, 
must fight and be fooled, must err and 
repent, must exhaust the dangerous knowl- 
edge of the great university for which his 
age at last befits him. The ordeal will 
harm neither him nor you : and yet you 
cannot help an anxious look at him, full 
four feet tall from crown to toe, and with 
a leg like an obelisk, preserving unseason- 
ably his ambiguous early air of exagger- 
ated goodness. One day he follows you 
from the station, and meets the small 
Mephisto on the homeward path. They 



THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 79 

dig a bone together, and converse behind 
trees ; and when you call Pup, he snorts 
his initial defiance, and dances away in the 
tempter's wake. Finally, your whistle 
compels him, and he comes soberly for- 
ward. By this time the ringleader terrier 
is departing, with a diabolical wink. You 
remember that, a moment before, he stood 
on a mound, whispering in your innocent's 
beautiful danghng ear, and you glance 
sharply at Pup. Yes, it has happened ! 
He will never seem quite the same again, 
with 

— *' the contagion of the world's slow stain " 

beginning in his candid eyes. He is a 
dog now. He knows. 

1893. 



On Dying Considered as a Dramatic 
Situation 



ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 
A DRAMATIC SITUATION 



AM AN of thought wears himself out, 
standing continually on the defen- 
sive. The more original a character, the 
more it is at war with common conditions, 
the more it wastes its substance scourging 
the tides and charging windmills ; and this 
being recognized, the exceptional person, 
your poet or hero, is expected to show an 
ascetic pallor, to eat and sleep little, to 
have a horrible temper, and to die at 
thirty-seven. Has he an active brain, he 
must pay for it by losing all the splendid 
passivity, inner and outer, which belongs 
to oxen and philosophers. Nor, on the 
other hand, will stupidity and submission 
promote longevity : for this is a bullying 
world. A wight with no mind to end 
himself by fretting and overdoing, is chari- 
tably ended by the action of his superiors. 



84 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 

social or military. How many privates 
had out of Balaklava but a poor posthu- 
mous satisfaction ! The Saxon soldier 
does not shed his skin in times of peace : 
he is the same in garrisons and barracks 
as amid the roar of guns ; and his ruling 
passion is still to stand in herds and be 
killed. A few years ago, an infantry com- 
pany, in the south of England, were 
marching into the fields for rifle-practice. 
Filing through a narrow lane, they saw 
two runaway horses, half-detached from 
their carriage, round the bend and rush 
towards them. The officer in charge 
either did not perceive them so soon as 
the others, or else he was slow to collect 
his wits, and give the order to disperse 
into the hedgerows for safety. As the 
order, for whichever cause, was not uttered, 
not a single recruit moved a muscle ; but 
the ranks strode on, with as solid and 
serene a front as if on dress-parade, straight 
under those wild hoofs and wheels : and 
afterwards, what was left of eleven men 
was cheerfully packed off, not to the ceme- 
tery, by great luck, but to the hospital. 
And in Germany, only the other day, the 
sergeant who superintends the daily gym- 



A DRAMATIC SITUATION 85 

nastic exercises of a certain camp, marched 
a small detachment of men, seven or eight 
in number, into the lake to swim. In 
went the men, up to their necks and over 
their heads, and made an immediate and 
unanimous disappearance. The sergeant, 
impatient to have them finish their bath, 
returned presently, and was shocked to 
discover that they were all drowned ! 
Now, it happened that the seven or eight 
could not swim a stroke between them, 
but they thought it unnecessary to make 
any remark to that effect. Is it not evi- 
dent that these fine dumb fellows can beat 
the world at a fight ? Yet their immense 
practical value has no artistic significance. 
They strike the unintelligent attitude. It 
is no part of a private's business to exert 
his choice, his volition ; and without these, 
he loses pertinence. Therefore, to wear 
the eternal " piece of purple '' in a ballad, 
you must be at least a corporal. 

The mildest and sanest of us has a 
sneaking admiration for a soldier : lo, it is 
because his station implies a disregard of 
what we call the essential. The only ele- 
gant, gratifying exit of such a one is in 
artillery-smoke. A boy reads of Winkel- 



86 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 

ried and d'Assas with a thrill of satisfac- 
tion. Hesitation, often most meritorious, 
is unforgivable in those who have espoused 
a duty and a risk. Courage is the most 
ordinary of our virtues : it ought to win 
no great plaudits ; but for one who with- 
holds it, and " dares not put it to the 
touch," we have tremendous vituperations. 
In short, that man makes but a poor show 
thenceforward among his fellows, who hav- 
ing had an eligible chance to set up as a 
haloed ghost, evades it, and forgets the 
serviceable maxim of Marcus Aurelius, 
that " part of the business of life is to lose 
it handsomely." Of like m'ind was Mu- 
sonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus ; 
" Take the first chance of dying nobly, 
lest, soon after, dying indeed come to thee, 
but noble dying nevermore." Once in a 
while, such counsels stir a fellow-mortal 
beyond reason, and persuade him " for a 
small flash of honor to cast away himself." 
And if so, it proves that at last the right 
perception and application of what we are 
has dawned upon him. 

Though we get into this world by no 
request of our own, we have a great will to 
stay in it : our main desire, despite a 



A DRAMATIC SITUATION 87 

thousand buffets of the wind, is to hang 
on to the branch. The very suicide-elect, 
away from spectators, oftenest splashes 
back to the wharf Death is the one 
visitor from whom we scurry like so many 
children, and terrors thrice his size we 
face with impunity at every turn. The 
real hurt and end-all may be in the shape 
of a fall, a fire, a gossamer-slight misunder- 
standing. Or " the catastrophe is a nup- 
tial,*' as Don Adriano says in the comedy. 
But we can breast out all such venial 
calamities, so that we are safe from that 
which heals them. We have, too, an 
unconscious compassion for the men of 
antiquity. Few, if it came to the point, 
would change day for day, and be Alex- 
ander, on the magnificent consideration 
that, although Alexander was an incom- 
parable lion, Alexander is dead. Herrick's 
ingenuous verse floats into memory : 

**I joy to see 
Myself alive : this age best pleaseth me." 

Superfluous adorners of the nineteenth 
century, we have no enthusiasm to be what 
our doom makes us, mere gradators, little 
mounting buttresses of a coral-reef, atoms 



88 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 

atop of several layers, and presently buried 
under several more. We would strut, live 
insects for ever, working and waltzing 
over our progenitors* bones. Seventy-five 
flushing years are no boon to us, if at that 
tender period's end, we must be pushed 
aside from the wheel of the universe, and 
swept up like so much dust and chaff. 
Nor does it help us, when it comes to the 
inevitable deposal, to recall that while 
there were as yet no operas, menus, nor 
puns, one Methusalem and his folk had 
nine lazy centuries of it, and that their 
polar day, which was our proper heritage, 
vanished with them, and beggared the 
almanac. Appreciation of life is a modern 
art : it seems vexing enough that just in 
inverse proportion to the growing capacity 
of ladies and gentlemen, is the ever-dimin- 
ishing room allotted wherein to exhibit it 
to " the scoffing stars." Time has stolen 
from us our decades sacred to truancy and 
the circus, to adventure and loafing. 
Where is the age apiece in which to ex- 
plode shams, to do vast deeds, to general- 
ize, to learn a hawk from a hernshaw, to 
be good — O to be good ! an hour before 
bedtime ? Evening for us should be a 



A DRAMATIC SITUATION 89 

dogma in ahstracto ; seas and suns should 
change ; horizons should stretch incal- 
culably, cities bulge over their bounda- 
ries, deserts thicken with carriages, polite 
society increase and abound in caves and 
balloons, and in starlit tavern doorways 
on Matterhorn top : and still, crowded 
and jostled by less favored humanity, 
elbowing it through extinct and unborn 
multitudes, we would live, live ! and there 
should be no turf broken save by the 
plough, and no urns except for roses. 

It demonstrates what an amusing great 
babe a man is, that his love of life is 
usually equivalent to love of duration of 
life. To be ninety, we take to mean that 
one has had ninety years' worth out of the 
venture : a calculation born of the hood- 
winking calendar, and of a piece with Dog- 
berry's deductions. But this estimable 
existence of ours is measured by depths 
and not by lengths ; it is not uncommon 
for those who have compassed its greatest 
reach to be translated young, and wept 
over by perspicuous orators. And the 
smug person who expires " full of years," 
and empty, forsooth, of all things else, 
whose life is indeed covered, in several 



90 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 

senses, by a life-insurance, is thought to be 
the enviable and successful citizen. It is 
quite as well that the gods have allowed 
us no vote concerning our own fates : it 
would be too hard a riddle to guess 
whether it is a dignified thing to continue, 
or when it is a profitable hour to cease. 
A greedy soul, desiring to live, reaps his 
wish, like Endymion, between moonrise 
and dawn, and gapes, yet unaware, for a 
bank-account and octogenarianism., Why 
wouldst thou grow up, sirrah ? " To be a 
philosopher? a madman. An alchemist? 
a beggar. A poet ? esurit : an hungry 
jack." Mere possibility of further sensa- 
tion is a curious object of worship and 
desire. It has no meaning, save in rela- 
tion to its starry betters in whose courts 
it is a slave, for whose good it may be- 
come a victim. A lover protesting to his 
lady that she is dearer than his life, is pay- 
ing her, did he but consider it, a tricksy 
trivial compliment : as if he had said that 
she was more precious than a prejudice, 
adorable beyond a speculation. On the 
negative side only, in the subjective appli- 
cation, life is dear. Certainly, one can 
conceive of no more monstrous wrong to 



A DRAMATIC SITUATION 91 

a breathing man than to announce his 
demise. Swift's mortuary joke on Par- 
tridge is the supreme joke. A report that 
you are extinct damages your reputation 
beyond repair. We may picture a vision 
of wrath bursting into the editor's office : 
" I am told that yesterday you had my 
name, sir, in your column of Deaths. I 
demand contradiction." Unto whom the 
editor : " The Evening Bugaboo never con- 
tradicts itself. But I will, with pleasure, 
put you in, to-night, under the heading of 
Births." Some considerations are to the 
complainant a fiery phooka : strive as he 
will to adjust them, he gets thrown, and 
bruises his bones. 

Life is legal tender, and individual char- 
acter stamps its value. We are from a 
thousand mints, and all genuine ; despite 
our infinitely diverse appraisements, we 
" make change " for one another. So 
many Ideals planted are worth the great 
gold of Socrates ; so many impious laws 
broken are worth John Brown. We may 
give ourselves in ha'pence fees for horses, 
social vogue, tobacco, books, a journey ; 
or be lavished at once for some good out- 
ranking them all. And of the two dan- 



92 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 

gers of hoarding and spending, the former 
seems a thousand times more imminent 
and appalling. Our moralists, who have 
done away with duels, and taught us the 
high science of solidarity, have deflected 
us from our collateral relative, the knight- 
errant, who seemed to go about seeking 
that which might devour him. But there 
are times when a prince is called suddenly 
to his coronation, and must throw largesses 
as he rides ; when the commonest worka- 
day life hears a summons, and wins the 
inalienable right to spill itself on the high- 
way, among the crowd. We make a mis- 
erable noisy farcical entry, one by one, on 
the terrene stage ; it is a last dramatic 
decency that we shall learn to bow our- 
selves out with gallantry, be it even among 
the drugs and pillows of a too frequent lot. 
But the enviable end is the other : some 
situations have inherent dignity, and exist 
already in the play. Death in battle is 
(for the commissioned officer) a gracefully 
effective mode of extinction ; so is any 
execution for principle's sake. The men 
who fill the historic imagination are the 
men who strove and failed, and put into 
port at Traitors' Gate. The political 



A DRAMATIC SITUATION 93 

scaffold. In fact, is an artistic creation. 
When a scholar looks up, the first eyes 
he meets are the eyes of those who stand 
there, in cheerful acquiescence, " alive, 
alert, immortal." " An axe," says Bishop 
Jeremy Taylor, " is a much less affliction 
than a strangury." While the headsman 
awaited on every original inspiration, under 
" hateful Henry " as under Nero, life cer- 
tainly had a romance and gusto unknown 
to modern spirits. The rich possibilities 
of any career got, at some time, congested 
tragically into this. How readily any one 
might see that, and welcome the folly and 
ignominy which drove him to an illustri- 
ous early grave ! Raleigh, at the last, 
kissed the yet bloodless blade "which 
ends this strange eventful history," say- 
ing : " 'T is a sharp medicine, but a cure 
for all diseases." Disguised and hunted. 
Campion of S. John^s, following his duty, 
steals along the Harrow Road, by Tyburn 
tree, and passing it, in a sort of awful love- 
longing, and as if greeting the promised 
and foreordained, smilingly raises his hat. 
Not by grace only are men " so in love 
with death," but by habit, by humor, 
and through economic effort. Logic as 



94 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 

well as faith understands the evangel : 
" Whoso loseth his life shall find it." 
The hero can await, without a flutter, the 
disarming of his hand and hope ; for he 
can never be stolen upon unawares. His 
prayer has always been for 

** Life that dares send 
A challenge to its end. 
And when it comes, say, 'Welcome, friend ! ' *' 

He must cease en gentilhommey as he has 
heretofore continued. To have Azrael 
catch him by the leg, like a scampering 
spider, is not agreeable to his ideas of 
etiquette. At any age, after any fashion, 
it is only the hero who dies ; the rest of 
us are killed off. He resembles Cart- 
right*s "virtuous young gentlewoman" : 

" Others are dragged away, or must be driven ; 
She only saw her time, and stepped to Heaven." 

We act out to its close our parable of the 
great babe, who has clutched his little 
treasure long and guardedly, unwilling to 
share it, and from whom, for discipline's 
sake, it must needs be taken. But the 
martyr-mind, in conscious disposal, is like 
the young Perseus, bargaining with Pallas 



A DRAMATIC SITUATION 95 

Athene for a brief existence and glory. 
The soul meets its final opportunity, as 
at a masked ball ; if it cannot stand and 
salute, to what end were its fair faculties 
given ? Or, we are all pedestrians in a 
city, hurrying towards our own firesides, 
eager, preoccupied, mundane. Perhaps 
at the turn of a steep street, there is the 
beauty of sunset, " brightsome Apollo in 
his richest pomp," the galleons of cloud- 
land in full sail, every scarlet pennon 
flying. One or two pause, as if from a 
sharp call or reminder, and beholding 
such a revelation, forget the walk and 
the goal, and are rapt into infinitude. 
Immortalitas adest I Now, most of us 
crawl home to decease respectably of " a 
surfeit of lampreys." We keep the names, 
however, of those who seem to make their 
exit to the sound of spiritual trumpets, 
and who fling our to-morrow's innocent 
gauds away, to clothe themselves with 
inexhaustible felicity. 

1887. 



A Bitter Complaint of the Ungentle 
Reader 



A BITTER COMPLAINT OF 
THE UNGENTLE READER. 



AN editor, a person of authority 
and supposed discretion, requested 
a friend of mine, the other day, to write 
an essay with this weird title : "How to 
Read a Book of Poems so as to Get the 
Most Good out of It." My friend, 
" more than usual calm," politely excused 
himself, suffering the while from sup- 
pressed oratory. He felt that the dia- 
bolic suggestion, made in all 

** Conscience and tendre herte," 

amounted to a horrible implied doubt con- 
cerning the lucidity of himself and other 
minor bards, publishing to-day and to- 
morrow. They have become difficult to 
read, only because a too educational world 
of readers is determined to find them so. 
Now, eating is to eat, with variations in 



loo A BITTER COMPLAINT 

haste, order, quantity, quality, and noc- 
turnal visions : with results, in short ; but 
eating is to eat. Even thus, as it would 
appear to a plain mind, reading is to 
read. Can it be that any two or two 
thousand can wish to be preached at, in 
order that they may masticate a page cor- 
rectly, in squads ? that they may never 
forget, like Mr. Gladstone's progeny, to 
apportion thirty-two bites to every stanza, 
with the blessing before, and the grace 
after? No full-grown citizen is under 
compulsion to read ; if he do so at all, let 
him do it individually, by instinct and 
favor, for wantonness, for private adven- 
ture's sake : and incidental profit be hanged, 
drawn and quartered ! To enter a library 
honorably, is not to go clam-digging after 
useful information, nor even after emotions. 
The income to be secured from any book 
stands in exact disproportion to the pur- 
pose, as it were, of forcing the testator's 
hand : a moral very finely pointed in The 
Taming of the Shrew^ and again in Aurora 
Leigh, To read well is to make an im- 
palpable snatch at whatever item takes 
your eye, and run. The schoolmaster 
has a contradictory theory. He would 



OF THE UNGENTLE READER loi 

have us in a chronic agony of inquisitive- 
ness, and with minds gluttonously recep- 
tive, not of the little we need (which it is 
the ideal end and aim of a university edu- 
cation, according to Newman, to perceive 
and to assimilate) but of the much not 
meant for us. Wherefore to the school- 
master there may be chanted softly in 
chorus : Ah^ mon pere, ce que vous dites la 
est du dernier bourgeois. The Muse is 
dying nowadays of over-interpretation. 
Too many shepherd swains are trying to 
Get the Most Good out of her. When 
Caius Scriblerius prints his lyric about the 
light of Amatoria's eyes, which disperses 
his melancholy moods, the average public, 
at least in Boston, cares nothing for it, 
until somebody in lack of employment dis- 
covers that as Saint Patrick's snakes were 
heathen rites, and as Beatrice Portinari 
was a system of philosophy, so Amatoria's 
eyes personify the sun-myth. And Caius 
shoots into his eleventh edition. 

Mr. Browning, perhaps, will continue 
to bear this sort of enlargement and inter- 
fusion ; indeed, nothing proves his calibre 
quite so happily as the fact that his capa- 
cious phantasmal figure, swollen with the 



I02 A BITTER COMPLAINT 

gas of much comment and expounding, 
has a fair and manly look, and can still 
carry off, as we say, its deplorable circum- 
ference. But at the present hour, there is 
nothing strange in imagining less opaque 
subjects being hauled in for their share of 
dissection before Browning societies. Pic- 
ture, for instance, a conclave sitting from 
four to six over the sensations of Mrs. 
BofFkin, 

'* Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary's 
fits." 

(For Mr. Kipling must be a stumbling- 
block unto some, as unto many a scandal.) 
Is there no fun left in Israel ? Have we 
to endure, for our sins, that a super-civil- 
ization insists on being vaccinated by the 
poor little poets, who have brought, alas, 
no instrument but their lyre ? Can we 
no longer sing, without the constraint of 
doling out separately to the hearer, what 
rhetoric is in us, what theory of vowel 
color, what origin and sequences, what 
occult because non-existent symbolism ? 
without setting up for oracles of dark im- 
port, and posing romantically as " greater 
than we know " ? To what a pass has the 



OF THE UNGENTLE READER 103 

ascendant New England readeress brought 
the harmless babes of Apollo ! She seeks 
to master all that is, and to raise a com- 
placent creation out of its lowland wisdom 
to her mountainous folly's level ; she 
touches nothing that she does not adorn 
— with a problem ; she approves of 
music and pictures whose reasonableness 
is believed to be not apparent to the com- 
mon herd ; she sheds scholastic blight 
upon " dear Matt Prior's easy jingle/' 
and unriddles for you the theological 
applications of 

" Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy : 
*I am extremely hungaree.' '* 

She is forever waking the wrong passen- 
ger : forever falling upon the merely beau- 
tiful, and exacting of it what it was never 
born to yield. The arts have a racial 
shyness : the upshot of this scrutiny of 
their innocent faces is that they will be 
fain to get into a hole and hide away for 
good. We lay it all to the ladies ; for 
the old lazy unprovincialized world of 
men was never so astute and excruciating. 
There were no convenings for the pur- 
pose of illuminating the text of Dr. John 



I04 A BITTER COMPLAINT 

Donne, although the provocation was 
unique. Poets were let alone, once upon 
a time ; and all they did for their own 
pleasure and sowed broadcast for. the 
pleasure of others, failed not, somehow, to 
fulfil itself from the beginning unto the 
end. What is meant for literature now, 
begotten in simpleness and bred in delight, 
arises as a quarrel between producer and 
consumer, 

*'And thereof come in the end despondency and 
madness." 

The man's attitude, even yet, towards a 
book of poetry which is tough to him, is 
to drop it, even as the gods would have 
him do ; the woman's is to smother it in 
a sauce of spurious explanation, and gulp 
it down. 

In a sophisticating age, it is the nature 
of poets to remain young. Their buyers 
are always one remove nearer to the sick 
end of the century, and being themselves 
tainted with a sense of the importance of 
the scientific, are in so much disqualified 
to judge of the miracle, the phenomenon, 
which poetry is. To whomever has an idle 
and a fresh heart, there is great encourage- 



OF THE UNGENTLE READER 105 

ment in the poetic outlook. The one 
harassing dread is that modern readers 
may scorch that hopeful field. They 
refuse to take us for what we are: they 
are of one blood with the mediaeval Nomi- 
nalists, who regarded not the existence of 
the thing, but the name by which they 
denoted it. They make our small gift 
futile, and their own palates a torment. 
We solemnly pronounce our wares, such 
as they be, handsomer in the swallowing 
than in the chewing : alas, so far, it is our 
fate to be chewed. Who can help apply- 
ing to an adult magazine constituency 
which yearns to be told How to Read a 
Book of Poems, the " so help me God " 
of dear Sir Thomas More ? " So help 
me God, and none otherwise but as I 
verily think, that many a man buyeth Hell 
with so much pain, he might have Heaven 
with less than the one-half 



894. 



Animum non Coelum 



ANIMUM NON COELUM 



HORACE was not often wrong, in 
his habitual beautiful utterance of 
commonplace ; but was he not altogether 
wrong when he gave us the maxim that 
the traveller may change the sky over 
him, but not the mind within him ? that 
the mood, the personal condition, is not 
to be driven forth by any new sea or land, 
but must cling to a man in his flight, like 
the pollen under a bee's wing? Sick 
souls started out from the Rome of 
Augustus, with intent to court adventure 
and drown care, even as they do now 
from Memphremagog and Kalamazoo, 
U. S. A. These Horace noted, and dis- 
couraged with one of his best fatalisms. 
Human trouble, nevertheless, has for its 
sign-manual a packed valise and a steamer- 
ticket. Broken hearts pay most of the 
bills at European hotels. For they know, 
better than the wounded in body, that the 



no ANIMUM NON COELUM 

one august inevitable relief, the wizard 
pill against stagnation, is, was, shall ever 
be, " strange countries for to see." In 
the long run, self cannot withstand the 
overwhelming spectacle of other faces, and 
the vista of other days than ours. Un- 
rest, however caused, must melt away in- 
sensibly in the glow of old art, and before 
the thought, widening the breast, in cities 
or on the Alpine slopes, of what has been. 
The tourist, be he of right mettle, falls in 
love with the world, and with the Will 
which sustains it. As much solace or 
exhilaration as comes into the eye and ear, 
so much evil, in the form of sadness, re- 
bellion, ignorance, passes out from us, as 
breathed breath into the purer air. Boast 
as we may, we are not, immigrating, what 
we were, emigrating. We come away be- 
witched from the great playhouse of our 
forefathers; no thorn in the flesh seems 
so poignant now as it was, in that remem- 
brance. Time, master-workman that he 
is, annuls and softens grief, and allows 
joy to sink in and spread. W^hat we 
alter, surely, is not the same dumb blue 
ether overhead, but the little carnal roof 
and heaven domed between that and us. 



ANIMUM NON COELUM in 

Travel, to the cheerful, is cheerful busi- 
ness ; to the overcast nature it is some- 
thing better. Upon the smoky and 
clouded ceiling of his own consciousness, 
darkened once despite him, but perhaps 
kept wilfully dark since, " for very wanton- 
ness," travel lays her cunning finger. Sud- 
den frescos begin, unawares, to gleam and 
flush there, in gold and olive and rose, as 
if Fra Angelico had been set loose with 
his palette in a sequestered cloister. Your 
Horace, be it known, was a home-keeper, 
and, as Stevenson claimed that dogs avoid 
doing, " talks big of what does not con- 
cern him." 

There is but one thing which can hon- 
orably draw the heart out of an American 
in Europe. He has wrought for himself 
the white ideal of government; he be- 
longs to a growing, not a decaying soci- 
ety ; there is much without, upon which 
he looks with wonder and even with pity ; 
for he is, as the monkish chroniclers 
would s2iYjfilius hujus s^culi, a child of 
to-day and to-morrow. In " that state of 
life to which it has pleased God to call " 
him, he should be the proclaimed brother 
of mankind, and the outrider of civiliza- 



112 ANIMUM NON COELUM 

tion ; he has an heroic post and outlook, 
and these bring their responsibilities : why 
should he, how can he, forego them for 
the accidental pleasure to be had in alien 
capitals ? But one thing he sees far away 
which he can never live to call his, in the 
west; he cannot transfer hither the yes- 
terday of his own race, the dark charm of 
London, the glamour of Paris, the majesty 
and melancholy of Rome. If he has a 
nature which looks deep and walks slowly, 
he shall not pass the image of any old 
kingdom unbeguiled ; either to his living 
senses, or to his distant and hopeless 
meditations, that world beyond wide waters 
will seem to him the fairest of created 
things, like the unbought lamp worth all 
that Aladdin ever cherished in his nar- 
row youth. For yesterday is ours also, 
to have and to hold, though it be an 
oak which grows not within our own 
garden walls, and is to be reached only 
by a going forth, and a wrenching of the 
heart-strings. And that which makes the 
worthy pilgrim into an exile and a cos- 
mopolite is no vanity, no ambition, no 
mere restless energy : it is truly the love 
of man which calleth over seas, and from 



ANIMUM NON COELUM 113 

towers a great way off. His shrine is 
some common and unregarded place, a 
mediaeval stair, it may be, worn hollow as 
a gourd by the long procession of mortal- 
ity. That concave stone touches him, 
and makes his blood tingle : it has magic 
in it, of itself, without a record ; for it 
speaks of the transit of human worth and 
human vices, both of which Dante makes 
his Ulysses long for, and seek to under- 
stand. It is our sunken footfall, ages ere 
we were born, while we were on forgotten 
errands, nursing irrecoverable thoughts. 
To have marked it, with perhaps the larg- 
est emotion of our lives, is to walk Broad- 
way or a Texan tow-path humbler and 
better ever after. 

Who is to be blamed if he do indeed 
go " abroad,'' or stay abroad, so strangely 
finding there, rather than here, the souFs 
peace ? for the soul has rights which may 
cancel even the duties of the ballot. Of 
what avail is Americanism, unless it earn 
for a man the freedom of rival cities, wrap 
him in a good dream, taking rancor from 
him, and put him in harmony with all 
master events gone by ? The young Re- 
public has children who come into the 
8 



114 ANIMUM NON COELUM 

field of historic Christendom, to bathe 
themselves in the dignity and roominess 
of life, and to walk gladly among the ever- 
green traditions, which surge like tall June 
grass about their knees. What they never 
had, natural piety teaches them to desire 
and to worship, and their happy Parthian 
faces are bright with the setting sun. 
There are hundreds such, and blessed 
are they ; for they move meanwhile un- 
der an innocent spell, and ignobler visions 
cannot touch them. It is their vocation 
to make a thronged spiritual solitude of 
their own. Under the self-same night of 
stars, they are changed : they have found 
other minds, more reverent, more chas- 
tened, more sensitized. Because they are 
converts, they cannot always be judged 
fairly. You shall meet them in summer- 
time at Bruges and Nuremberg, and 
in the transept of Westminster Abbey, 
elbowed by pilgrims of another clay, but 
ever rapt and mute : " whether in the 
body, or out of the body, I know not; 
God knoweth." 

1894. 



The Precept of Peace 



THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 



A CERTAIN sort of voluntary ab- 
straction is the oddest and choic- 
est of social attitudes. In France, where 
all aesthetic discoveries are made, it was 
crowned long ago : la sainte indifference is, 
or may be, a cult, and le saint indifferent 
an articled practitioner. For the Gallic 
mind, brought up at the knee of a con- 
sistent paradox, has found that not to 
appear concerned about a desired good is 
the only method to possess it ; full happi- 
ness is given, in 'other words, to the very 
man who will never sue for it. This is a 
secret neat as that of the Sphinx : to " go 
softly " among events, yet domineer them. 
Without fear : not because we are brave, 
but because we are exempt ; we bear so 
charmed a life that not even Baldur's 
mistletoe can touch us to harm us. 
Without solicitude : for the essential 
thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from 



ii8 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 

above upon our wrists, and it has become 
with us an automatic motion to open the 
hand, and drop what appertains to us no 
longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the 
shorter stick of celery, or 

" The friends to whom we had no natural right. 
The homes that were not destined to be ours," 

it is all one : let it fall away ! since only 
so, by depletions, can we buy serenity 
and a blithe mien. It is diverting to 
study, at the feet of Antisthenes and of 
Socrates his master, how many indispensa- 
bles man can live without ; or how many 
he can gather together, make over into 
luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau 
somewhere expresses himself as full of 
divine pity for the " mover," who on 
May-Day clouds city streets with his mel- 
ancholy household caravans : fatal impedi- 
menta for an immortal. No : furniture 
is clearly a superstition. " I have Uttle, 
I want nothing ; all my treasure is in 
Minerva's tower." Not that the novice 
may not accumulate. Rather, let him 
collect beetles and Venetian interrogation- 
marks ; if so be that he may distinguish 
what is truly extrinsic to him, and bestow 



THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 119 

these toys, eventually, on the children of 
Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. 
Of all his store, unconsciously increased, 
he can always part with sixteen-seven- 
teenths, by way of concession to his indi- 
viduality, and think the subtraction so 
much concealing marble chipped from the 
heroic figure of himself. He would be a 
donor from the beginning ; before he can 
be seen to own, he will disencumber, and 
divide. Strange and fearful is his dis- 
covery, amid the bric-a-brac of the world, 
that this knowledge, or this material bene- 
fit, is for him alone. He would fain beg 
off from the acquisition, and shake the 
touch of the tangible from his imperious 
wings. It is not enough to cease to strive 
for personal favor ; your true indifferent is 
Early Franciscan : caring not to have, he 
fears to hold. Things useful need never 
become to him things desirable. Towards 
all commonly-accounted sinecures, he bears 
the coldest front in Nature, like a magi- 
cian walking a maze, and scornful of its 
flower-bordered detentions. " I enjoy 
life," says Seneca, " because I am ready 
to leave it." Ja wohll and they who act 
with jealous respect for their morrow of 



I20 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 

civilized comfort, reap only indigestion, 
and crow's-foot traceries for their deluded 
eye-corners. 

Now nothing is farther from le saint 
indifferent than cheap indifferentism, so- 
called : the sickness of sophomores. His 
business is to hide, not to display, his 
lack of interest in fripperies. It is not 
he who looks languid, and twiddles his 
thumbs for sick misplacedness, like 
Achilles ampng girls. On the contrary, 
he is a smiling industrious elf, mon- 
strous attentive to the canons of polite 
society. In ^relation to others, he shows 
what passes for animation and enthusi- 
asm ; for at ^11 times his character is 
founded on control of these qualities, not 
on the absence of them. It flatters his 
sense of superiority that he may thus pull 
wool about the ears of joint and several. 
He has so strong a will that it can be 
crossed and counter-crossed, as by him- 
self, so by a dozen outsiders, without a 
break in his apparent phlegm. He has 
gone through volition, and come out at 
the other side of it ; everything with him 
is a specific act : he has no habits. Le 
saint indifferent is a dramatic wight: he 



THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 121 

loves to refuse your proffered six per cent, 
when, by a little haggling, he may obtain 
three-and-a-half. For so he gets away 
with his own mental processes virgin : it 
is inconceivable to you that, being sane, 
he should so comport himself. Amiable, 
perhaps, only by painful propulsions and 
sore vigilance, let him appear the mere 
inheritor of easy good-nature. Unselfish 
out of sheer pride, and ever eager to 
claim the slippery side of the pavement, 
or the end cut of the roast (on the secret 
ground, be it understood, that he is not 
as Capuan men, who wince at trifles), let 
him have his ironic reward in passing 
for one whose physical connoisseurship is 
yet in the raw. That sympathy which 
his rule forbids his devoting to the usual 
objects, he expends, with some bravado, 
upon their opposites ; for he would fain 
seem a decent partisan of some sort, not 
what he is, a bivalve intelligence, Tros 
Tyriusque. He is known here and there, 
for instance, as valorous in talk ; yet he is 
by nature a solitary, and, for the most 
part, somewhat less communicative than 

" The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride, 
Lonely and terrible, on the Andean height.** 



122 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 

Imagining nothing idler than words in 
the face of grave events, he condoles 
and congratulates with the genteelest air 
in the world. In short, while there is 
anything expected of him, while there are 
spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of 
the fellow prove inexhaustible. It is only, 
when he is quite alone that he drops his 
jaw, and stretches his legs ; then, heigho ! 
arises like a smoke, and envelops him 
becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred 
torpidity of the gods, of poetic boredom, 
of "the Oxford manner." 

" How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable ! ' ' 

sighed Hamlet of this mortal outlook. 
As it came from him in the beginning, 
that plaint, in its sincerity, can come only 
from the man of culture, who feels about 
him vast mental spaces and depths, and 
to whom the face of creation is but com- 
parative and symbolic. Nor will he 
breathe it in the common ear, where it 
may woo misapprehensions, and breed 
ignorant rebellion. The unlettered must 
ever love or hate what is nearest him, 
and, for lack of perspective, think his own 
fist the size of the sun. The social 



THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 123 

prizes, which, with mellowed observers, 
rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order of 
desirability, such as wealth and a foot- 
hold in affairs, seem to him first and sole ; 
and to them he clings like a barnacle. 
But to our indifferent, nothing is so vul- 
gar as close suction. He will never 
tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity ; 
he is a gentleman, the hero of the habit- 
ually relaxed grasp. A light unpreju- 
diced hold on his profits strikes him as 
decent and comely, though his true 
artistic pleasure is still in " fallings from 
us, vanishings." It costs him little to 
loose and to forego, to unlace his tenta- 
cles, and from the many who push hard 
behind, to retire, as it were, on a never- 
guessed-at competency, " richer than 
untempted kings." He would not be a 
life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. 
While the tranquil Sabine Farm is his de- 
light, well he knows that on the dark trail 
ahead of him, even Sabine Farms are not 
sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to 
play the guest under his own cedars, and, 
with disciplinary intent, goes often from 
them ; and, hearing his heart-strings snap 
the third night he is away, rejoices that 



124 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 

he is again a freedman. Where his foot 
is planted (though it root not anywhere), 
he calls that spot home. No Unitarian 
in locality, it follows that he is the best 
of travellers, tangential merely, and pleased 
with each new vista of the human Past. 
He sometimes wishes his understanding 
less, that he might itch deliciously with 
a prejudice. With cosmic congruities, 
great and general forces, he keeps, all 
along, a tacit understanding, such as one 
has with beloved relatives at a distance ; 
and his finger, airily inserted in his outer 
pocket, is really upon the pulse of eter- 
nity. His vocation, however, is to bury 
himself in the minor and immediate task ; 
and from his intent manner, he gets con- 
founded, promptly and permanently, with 
the victims of commercial ambition. 

The true use of the much-praised 
Lucius Gary, Viscount Falkland, has hardly 
been apprehended : he is simply the 
patron saint of indifferent s. From first 
to last, almost alone in that discordant 
time, he seems to have heard far-off re- 
solving harmonies, and to have been 
rapt away with foreknowledge. Battle, to 
which all knights were bred, was peniten- 



THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 125 

tial to him. It was but a childish means : 
and to what end ? He meanwhile, — and 
no man carried his will in better abeyance 
to the scheme of the universe, — wanted 
no diligence in camp or council. Cares 
sat handsomely on him who cared not at 
all, who won small comfort from the cause 
which his conscience finally espoused. He 
labored to be a doer, to stand well with 
observers ; and none save his intimate 
friends read his agitation and profound 
weariness. " I am so much taken notice 
of,'* he writes, "for an impatient desire 
for peace, that it is necessary I should 
likewise make it appear how it is not out 
of fear for the utmost hazard of war." 
And so, driven from the ardor he had to 
the simulation of the ardor he lacked, 
loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of two 
transient opinions, and inly impartial as 
a star. Lord Falkland fell : the young 
never-to-be-forgotten martyr of Newbury 
field. The imminent deed he made a 
work of art ; and the station of the moment 
the only post of honor. Life and death 
may be all one to such a man : but he 
will at least take the noblest pains to 
discriminate between Tweedledum and 



126 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 

Tweedledee, if he has to write a book 
about the variations of their antennae. 
And like the CaroHan exemplar is the 
disciple. The indifferent is a good thinker, 
or a good fighter. He is no " immartial 
minion/' as dear old Chapman suffers 
Hector to call Tydides. Nevertheless, his 
sign-manual is content with humble and 
stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the 
Himalayas of life affects him, very palpa- 
bly, as "tall talk." He deals not with 
things, but with the impressions and 
analogies of things. The material counts 
for nothing with him : he has moulted it 
away. Not so sure of the identity of the 
higher course of action as he is of his con- 
secrating dispositions, he feels that he may 
make heaven again, out of sundries, as he 
goes. Shall not a beggarly duty, dis- 
charged with perfect temper, land him in 
" the out-courts of Glory," quite as suc- 
cessfully as a grand Sunday-school excur- 
sion to front the cruel Paynim foe ? He 
thinks so. Experts have thought so 
before him. Francis Drake, with the 
national alarum instant in his ears, desired 
first to win at bowls, on the Devon sward, 
" and afterwards to settle with the Don." 



THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 127 

No one will claim a buccaneering hero 
for an indifferent^ however. The Jesuit 
novices were ball-playing almost at that 
very time, three hundred years ago, when 
some too speculative companion, figur- 
ing the end of the world in a few mo- 
ments (with just leisure enough, between, 
to be shriven in chapel, according to his 
own thrifty mind), asked Louis of Gon- 
zaga what he, on his part, should do in 
the precious interval. " I should go on 
with the game," said the most innocent 
and most ascetic youth among them. 
But to cite the behavior of any of the 
saints is to step over the playful line 
allotted. Indifference of the mundane 
brand is not to be confounded with their 
detachment, which is emancipation wrought 
in the soul, and the ineffable efflorescence 
of the Christian spirit. Like most super- 
natural virtues, it has a laic shadow ; the 
counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, 
is one not only of perfection, but also of 
polity. A very little non-adhesion to 
common affairs, a little reserve of uncon- 
cern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, pro- 
vide the moral immunity which is the 
only real estate. The indifferent believes 



128 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 

in storms : since tales of shipwreck en- 
compass him. But once among his own 
kind, he wonders that folk should 
be circumvented by merely extraneous 
powers ! His favorite catch, woven in 
among escaped dangers, rises through 
the roughest weather, and daunts it : 

** Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners. 
For we be come into a quiet rode.'* 

No slave to any vicissitude, his imagina- 
tion is, on the contrary, the cheerful obsti- 
nate tyrant of all that is. He lives, as 
Keats once said of himself, " in a thousand 
worlds,'' withdrawing at will from one to 
another, often curtailing his circumference 
to enlarge his liberty. His universe is a 
universe of balls, like those which the 
cunning Oriental carvers make out of 
ivory ; each entire surface perforated with 
the same delicate pattern, each moving 
prettily and inextricably within the other, 
and all but the outer one impossible to 
handle. In some such innermost asylum 
the right sort of devil-may-care sits smil- 
ing, while we rage or weep. 

1894. 



On a Pleasing Encounter with a 
Pickpocket 



ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER 
WITH A PICKPOCKET. 



I WAS in town the other evening, walk- 
ing by myself, at my usual rapid 
pace, and ruminating, in all likelihood, on 
the military affairs of the Scythians, when, 
at a lonely street corner not adorned by a 
gas-lamp, I suddenly felt a delicate stir 
in my upper pocket. There is a sort of 
mechanical intelligence in a well-drilled 
and well-treated body, which can act, in 
an emergency, without orders from head- 
quarters. My mind, certainly, v/as a thou- 
sand years away, and is at best drowsy 
and indifferent. It had besides, no ex- 
perience, nor even hearsay, which would 
have directed it what to do at this thrilling 
little crisis. Before it was aware what had 
happened, and in the beat of a swallow's 
wing, my fingers had brushed the flying 
thief, my eyes saw him, and my legs 
(retired race-horses, but still great at a 



132 ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER 

spurt) flew madly after him. I protest 
that from the first, though I knew he had 
under his wicked thumb the hard-earned 
wealth of a notoriously poor poet (let the 
double-faced phrase, which I did not mean 
to write, stand there, under my hand, to 
all posterity), yet I never felt one yearning 
towards it, nor conceived the hope of re- 
venge. No : I was fired by the exquisite 
dramatic situation ; I felt my blood up, 
like a charger 

" that sees 
The battle over distances." 

I was in for the chase in the keen winter 
air, with the moon just rising over the city 
roofs, as rapturously as if I were a very 
young dog again. My able bandit, clearly 
viewed the instant of his assault, was a 
tiger-lily of the genus " tough " : short, 
pallid, sullen, with coat-collar up and hat- 
brim down, and a general air of mute and 
violent executive ability. My business 
in devoting this chapter to reminiscences 
of my only enemy, is to relate frankly 
what were my contemporaneous sensa- 
tions. As I wheeled about, neatly losing 
the chance of confronting him, and fa- 
vored with a hasty survey, in the dark. 



WITH A PICKPOCKET 133 

of his strategic mouth and chin, the one 
sentiment in me, if translated into English, 
would have uttered itself in this wise : 
"After years of dulness and decorum, 
O soul, here is some one come to play 
with thee ; here is Fun, sent of the immor- 
tal gods ! " 

This divine emissary, it was evident, 
had studied his ground, and awaited no 
activity on the part of the preoccupied 
victim, in a hostile and unfamiliar neigh- 
borhood. He suffered a shock when, 
remembering my ancient prowess in the 

fields of E , I took up a gallop within 

an inch of his nimble heels. Silently, as 
he ran, he lifted his right arm. We were 
soon in the blackness of an empty lot 
across the road, among coal-sheds and 
broken tins, with the far lights of the 
thoroughfare full in our faces. Quick 
as kobolds summoned up from earth, air, 
and nowhere, four fellows, about twenty 
years old, swarmed at my side, as like the 
first in every detail as foresight and art 
could make them ; and these darting, 
dodging, criss-crossing, quadrilling, and 
incessantly interchanging as they ad- 
vanced, covering the expert one's flight. 



134 ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER 

and multiplying his identity, shot sepa- 
rately down a labyrinth of narrow alleys, 
leaving me confused and checkmated, 
after a brief and unequal game, but over- 
come, nay, transported with admiration 
and unholy sympathy ! It was the pretti- 
est trick imaginable. 

It was near Christmas ; and, brought to 
bay, and still alone, I conjured up a vision 
of a roaring cellar-fire, and the snow whist- 
ling at the bulkhead, as the elect press in, 
with great slapping of hands and stamping 
of shoes, to a superfine night-long and 
month-long bowl of grog, MY grog, dealt 
out by Master Villon, with an ironic toast 
to the generous founder. I might have 
followed the trail, as I was neither breath- 
less nor afraid, but it struck me that the 
sweet symmetry of the thing ought not 
to be spoiled; that I was serving a new 
use and approximating a new experience ; 
that it would be a stroke of genius, in 
short, almost equal to the king pick- 
pocket's own, to make love to the inevi- 
table. Whereupon, bolstered against an 
aged fence, I laughed the laugh of Dr. 
Johnson, " heard, in the silence of the 
night, from Fleet Ditch to Temple Bar." 



WITH A PICKPOCKET 135 

I thought of the good greenbacks won 
by my siren singing in the Hodgepodge 
Monthly ; I thought of my family, who 
would harbor in their memories the 
inexplicable date when the munificent 
church-mouse waxed stingy. I thought 
even of the commandment broken and 
of the social pact defied, gave my collapsed 
pocket a friendly dig, and laughed again. 
The police arrived, with queries, and in- 
effective note-books. I went home, a 
shorn lamb, conscious of my exalted 
financial standing ; for had I not been 
robbed ? All the way I walked with 
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who came to 
mind promptly as my corporeal blessings 
departed. He intoned no requiem for the 
lost, but poured a known philosophy, in 
which I had now taken my degree, into 
my liberal ear : — 

" Why shouldst thou vex thyself, that 
never willingly vexed anybody ? " 

" A man has but two concerns in life : 
to be honorable in what he does, and 
resigned under what happens to him." 

" If any one misconduct himself towards 
thee, what is that to thee ? The deed is 
his ; and therefore let him look to it.'* 



136 ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER 

"Welcome everything that happens as 
necessary and familiar." 

Marry, a glow of honest self-satisfaction 
is cheaply traded for a wad of current 
specie, and an inkling into the ways of a 
bold and thirsty world. Methinks I have 
" arrived " ; I have attained a courteous 
composure proof against mortal hurricanes. 
Life is no longer a rude and trivial com- 
edy with the Beautifully Bulldozed, who 
feels able to warm to his own catastrophe, 
and even to cry, " Pray, madam, don't 
mention it," to an apologizing lady in a 
gig, who drives over him and kills him, 
and does so, moreover, in the most bung- 
ling manner in the world. 



892. 



Reminiscences of a Fine Gentleman 



REMINISCENCES OF A FINE 
GENTLEMAN 



MY friend was of illustrious ancestry. 
While so many trace their life- 
stream to pirates or usurpers who shed 
their brothers' blood to possess their 
brothers' power, it is a distinction worth 
recording, that this Fine Gentleman was 
descended from a princely person in 
Switzerland who saved some sixty lives, 
and whose ancient portrait is loaded, like 
a French marshal's, with the ribbons and 
medals of recognition. Though of foreign 
origin, he did an American thing at my 
introduction to him : he shook hands. I 
dropped the white pebble of the Cretans 
to mark the day he arrived. It is need- 
less to say I loved and understood him, 
— blond, aggressive, wilful, from the first. 
He had then, despite his extreme youth, 
the air of a fighting aristocrat, a taking 
swashbuckler attitude, as he stood at the 



I40 REMINISCENCES OF 

open door : the look of one who has 
character, and a defined part to play, and 
whose career can never reach a common 
nor ignoble end. Comely in the full 
sense he was not ; but impressive he was, 
despite the precocious leanness and alert- 
ness which come of too rapid growth. 

He had every opportunity, during his 
babyhood and later, of gratifying his ab- 
normal love of travel ; he managed to 
see more of city life than was good for 
him, thanks to many impish subterfuges. 
His golden curiosity covered everything 
mundane, and he continued his private 
studies in topography until he was kid- 
napped, and restored by the police : an 
abject, shamefaced little tourist, heavy 
with conscience, irresponsive to any wel- 
comes, who sidled into his abandoned 
residence, and forswore from that day 
his unholy peregrinations. But he had 
a roaming housemate, and grew to be 
supremely happy, journeying under 
guidance. 

His temper, at the beginning, was none 
of the best, and took hard to the idea of 
moral governance ; he overcame obstacles 
after the fashion of a catapult. His sense 



A FINE GENTLEMAN 141 

of humor was always grim : he had a 
smile, wide and significant, like a ko- 
bold*s ; but a mere snicker, or a wink, was 
foreign to his nature. With certain people 
he was sheer clown ; yet he discriminated, 
and never wore his habitual air of swag- 
gering consequence before any save those 
he was pleased to consider his inferiors. 
The sagacious and protective instincts 
were strong in him. For children he had 
the most marked indulgence and affec- 
tion, an inexhaustible gentleness, as if he 
found the only statecraft he could respect 
among them. For their delight he made 
himself into a horse, and rode many a 
screaming elf astride of his back for a 
half-mile through the meadow, before 
coming to the heart of the business, which 
was to sit or kneel suddenly, and cast 
poor Mazeppa yards away in the wet 
grass : a proceeding hailed with shouts of 
acclaim from the accompanying crowd of 
playfellows. And again, in winter, he 
became an otter, and placing himself upon 
his worthy back at the summit of a hill, 
rolled repeatedly to the bottom, drenched 
in snow, and buried under a coasting 
avalanche of boys. 



142 REMINISCENCES OF 

He never found time, in so short a life, 
to love many. Outside his own house- 
hold and his charming cat, he was very 
loyal to one lady whose conversation was 
pleasingly ironical, and to one gentleman 
whose character was said to resemble his 
own. Several others were acceptable, but 
for these two visitors he had the voice and 
gesture of joyful greeting. He had so 
arrant an individuality that folk loved or 
hated him. One could not look with 
indifference on that assertive splendid 
bearing, or on the mighty muscles as of a 
Norse ship. A civil address from you 
made him your liegeman. But the merest 
disregard or slight, no less than open hos- 
tility, sealed him your foe. And there 
were no stages of vacillation. A grudge 
stood a grudge, and a fondness a fond- 
ness. He was a famous retaliator ; none 
ever knew him to ride first into the lists. 
Battle he loved, but he had a gentlemanly 
dislike of " scenes " ; when a crisis came, 
he preferred to box or wrestle ; and what 
he preferred he could do, for no opponent 
ever left a scar upon him. A rival less in 
size, or impudent solely, he took by the 
nape of the neck and tossed over the near- 



A FINE GENTLEMAN 143 

est fence, resuming his walk with compo- 
sure. Training and education helped him 
to the pacific solving of many problems. 
His good dispositions, all but established, 
were once badly shaken by a country 
sojourn ; for he had been taught there a 
bit of cabalistic boys' Latin whose slight- 
est whisper would send him tiptoeing to 
every window in the house, scanning the 
horizon for a likely enemy, with a rapture 
worthy of another cause. 

He was rich in enemies, most of them 
of the gentler sex. Upon a civic holiday, 
three villageous women were seen to bear 
down upon him, as he was calmly inspect- 
ing the outposts of their property, laden 
with weapons {Hmor arma ministrat I ) no 
less classic than a pail, a broom, and an 
axe. Not Swift's self could have added 
to the look of withering comment with 
which he turned and confronted his as- 
sailants : a single glance which dispersed 
the troops, and held in itself the eloquence 
of an Aristophaneian comedy. Eternal 
warfare lay between him and the man who 
had peevishly flapped that haughty nose 
with a glove, before his first birthday-anni- 
versary, and revenge boiled in his eye. 



144 REMINISCENCES OF 

long after, at sight of a citizen who had once 
addressed to him a word unheard in good 
society. A loud tone, a practical joke, a 
teasing reminder of a bygone fault, dis- 
concerted him wholly. Sensitive and 
conservative of mood, my Fine Gentle- 
man could never forget a rudeness, nor 
account satisfactorily for such a thing as 
a condescension. All his culture and his 
thinking had not taught him to allow for 
the divers conditions and dispositions of 
mankind. To the last he looked for 
courtesy, for intelligence, and, alas, for 
fashionable clothes, in his ideal. For the 
Fine Gentleman was a snob. Hunger 
and nakedness, even honest labor, had for 
him no occult charm. Throughout his 
youth, he courted patrician acquaintances, 
and on the very highway ached to make 
worse rags yet of the floating rags of a 
beggar's coat ; but the experience of 
friendship with a kindly butcher-lad made 
inroads upon his exclusiveness ; and I 
know that, had he outlived his years, 
there would have been one more convert 
democrat. His own personal appearance 
was of the nicest ; by scrupulous superin- 
tendence of his laundry, chiefly by night. 



A FINE GENTLEMAN 145 

he kept himself immaculate and imposing. 
His colors were those of the fallen leaves 
and the snow ; the November auburn fall- 
ing away on either side from the magnifi- 
cent brow and eyes, and from the neck in 
its triple white fold : a head to remind 
you of Raleigh in his ruff. 

He must have been patriotic, for he 
revelled in the horns, gunpowder, rock- 
ets, and smoke of the Fourth of July. 
Archery and rifle-practice seemed to strike 
him as uncommonly pleasant devices to 
kill time. In all games which had noise 
and motion, he took the same strong 
vicarious interest. He had heard much 
music, and learned something of it ; he 
was once known to hum over an august 
recitative of the late Herr Wagner. Sin- 
gular to relate, he had an insuperable 
objection to books, and protested often 
against the continued use of the pen by 
one he would fain esteem. Yet he seemed 
greatly to relish the recital of a tribute 
of personal verse from a United States 
Senator, and the still more elaborate lines 
of a delightful professional satirist. 

His health, aside from his great size, 
his spirit and nervous vigor, was never 



146 REMINISCENCES OF 

steady nor sound. Every chapter of the 
Fine Gentleman's biography is crammed 
with events, perils, excitements, catas- 
trophes, and blunders, due in great part, 
by a scientific verdict, to this tremendous 
vitality balancing on too narrow a base. 
With years, there began to come the 
" philosophic mind." His sweetness and 
submission grew with his strength ; never 
was there a sinner so tender of conscience, 
so affected by remonstrance, so fruitful, 
after, in the good works of amended ways. 
New virtues seemed to shoof on all sides, 
and the old ones abided and flourished. 
He had never tried to deceive, nor to 
shirk, nor to rebel, nor to take what was 
not his, nor to appear other than he was. 
In the country town where he had many 
a frolic, and where he lies buried, he found 
congenial circumstances. There were no 
gardens there, no timid neighbors ; he 
had opportunity, being allowed to inspect 
everything that stirred in air, or upon the 
earth, or in the waters under, for the pur- 
suit of natural history, which was his pas- 
sion ; he ate what he pleased, he lorded 
it as he liked, he shifted his responsi- 
bilities, he won endless flattery from the 



A FINE GENTLEMAN 147 

inhabitants. His frank acknowledgment 
of all this was unique. On his return, 
while his escort was still in the room, the 
Fine Gentleman was asked whether he 
would rather remain now at home, or 
spend a week longer in the fascinating 
precincts of Cambrook. He arose briskly, 
bestowed on the questioner, whom he 
professed to adore, his warmest embrace 
(a thing unusual with him), and imme- 
diately, pulling his escort by the sleeve, 
placed himself at the door-knob which led 
into the more immoral world. His last 
accomplishment was to acquire an accurate 
sense of time, to make his quarter-hour 
calls, his half-hour walks, when sent out 
alone : " as wise as a Christian," an honest 
acquaintance was wont to say of him, per- 
haps on the suspicion that the Fine Gen- 
tleman, after he reached his majority, was 
a free-thinker. 

He was in his perfect prime when a 
slight seeming disgrace fell upon him, 
though an incident never clearly under- 
stood. His believers believed in him 
still ; but, for the need of quiet and im- 
partial adjustment of matters, persuaded 
him to stay an indefinite while in the be- 



148 REMINISCENCES OF 

loved farming district where many of his 
earlier vacations were spent. So that, after 
all his tender rearing, he was at last abroad 
and divorced : with a mist, such as we 
recognized immortals call sin, upon his 
spirit, and, because of that, a scruple and 
a doubt upon mine, answerable for much 
of what he was. Before the eventual 
proof came that he was clear of blame, 
there were thoughts even of an impera- 
tive parting, and a reaching for the 
rectification towards the Happy Hunt- 
ing-Grounds, where, at an era's end, we 
could be joyous together ; and where un- 
der the old guiding then never unskilful, 
the old sympathy then never erring, the 
Fine Gentleman could be to his virtue's 
full, and in no misapprehending air, his 
innocent, upright, loving self again. But 
instantly, as if to wipe out forever that 
possible evil of which men could dream 
him guilty, came the moving and memor- 
able end. Amid the tears of a whole 
town, and the thanksgiving of some for 
a greater grief averted, very quietly and 
consciously, under the most painful con- 
ditions, the Fine Gentleman laid down 
his life for a little child's sake. The fifth 



A FINE GENTLEMAN 149 

act of his tragedy had a sort of drastic con- 
sistency, to those who knew him ; it was 
in line with his odd, inborn, unconven- 
tional ways : the fate one would have 
chosen for him, and the fittest with which 
to associate his soldierly memory. In 
exile and cashiered, he had overturned 
his defamers at a stroke. 

It is not too proud a sentence to write 
over him, that this world, for the most 
part, was jealous of his nobility. Human 
society was some sort of huge jest to him; 
he did not always do his best there, as if 
the second-best were the shrewder policy, 
and the neater adaptation to the codes of 
honor he found established. His main 
concern was certainly the study of man- 
kind, and he stood to it, a free and un- 
bookish philosopher, looking on and not 
partaking, with his reticent tongue, his 
singularly soft foot-fall, his "eye like a 
wild Indian's, but cordial and full of 
smothered glee." To his own race he 
must be an epic figure and a precedent, 
and to ours something not undeserving 
of applause. 

" Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find. 
Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good 
a mind." 



I50 REMINISCENCES 

Such are the only annals of the Fine 
Gentleman, a Saint Bernard dog, faithful 
and forgotten, who bore a great Bostoni- 
an's name nearly five years without a stain, 
and who is, to one or two of us, not alone 
a friend lost, but an ideal set up : Perseus 
become a star. 

1889. 



Irish 



IRISH 



^ I^HEY say the Celt is passing away, 

'* Encompassed all his hours 
By fearfullest powers 
Inflexible to him." 

For he represents yesterday, and its 
ideals : legendry, ritual, the heroic and 
indignant joy of life, belong to him ; and 
he can establish no manner of connection 
with modern science and the subjugating 
of the material universe ; with the spirit 
of to-day and to-morrow. Of all Celtic 
countries, Ireland has the richest back- 
ground ; with so varied and exciting a 
past, it may well be that she has difficulty 
in concentrating herself on the new, and 
hangs to her own consistencies in a world of 
compromise. Every one save herself has 
forgotten what she was, and how her pre- 
cedents, rather than any outer considera- 
tion, must still govern her, and keep her 
antagonist and unreconciled. It is not to 



154 IRISH 

be modified, this pauper's pride of blood. 
She says to the powers, in charming futile 
bravado, what a Howard once said to a 
Spencer : " My ancestors were plotting 
treason, while yours were keeping sheep ! '' 
The word warms her heart like wine. 
"Zd- moyen age enorme et delicat^' in Ver- 
laine's beautiful colors, seems a phrase 
made for Irish mediaevalism. It was the 
watershed of European knowledge and 
moral culture ; the watershed truly, which, 
sending streams down and out and far 
away, can never call them back. It gave 
Scotland her " naked knee " and her 
kingly line ; it gave England its Chris- 
tian creed ; it gave modern France and 
Spain the noble enrichment of its ban- 
ished and stainless gentry, its Jacobite 
Wild Geese. It has been in America, 
from the Revolution on, an influence 
incalculable. It won the perfect under- 
standing sympathy of De Beaumont, Renan 
and Matthew Arnold : men of antipodal 
judgments. It has an intangible throne 
in every mind which loves scholarship, 
and imaginings more beautiful than any 
folk-lore in the world. " See you this 
skull ? '' Lucan makes Mercury say to 



IRISH 155 

Menippus, in the shades : " this is Helen." 
Great is the gulf between happy Innis- 
fail, sovereign and wise, with her own 
laws, language, sports, and dress, and this 
wrecked Ireland we know : a country of 
untended flax-fields, unworked marble- 
quarries, silent mills on river-banks, little 
collapsing baronies whose landlords are 
absent and cold, and a capital whose lordly 
houses are given over, since the Union, 
to neglect and decay. 

Yet of her glory there are glorious wit- 
nesses. Her rough and winding historic 
roads are open all along. The country is 
full of ruins and traditions and snatches of 
strange song, to " tease us out of thought." 
A gander off on a holiday, with his white 
spouse and their pretty brood, lifts his 
paternal hiss at the passer-by from a 
Druid's altar ; and where young lambs 
lie, in a windy spring, to lee of their 
mothers, is a magnificent doorway, Lom- 
bardic, Romanesque, or Hiberno-Saxon, 
arch in arch, with its broken inscription, 
an Orate for immemorial kings. At well- 
sides are yet seen ablutions and prayers, 
and May-Day offerings of corn and wool, 
even as they were " before the advent of 



156 IRISH 

the Desii into the County Waterford." 
By a waterfall, plunging under cleanest 
ivy and long grass, is a cross with circled 
centre and intricate Byzantine ornament, 
displaying David with his harp, or Peter 
with his keys, set up by a monastic hand 
twelve hundred years ago. Forty feet 
away, is something dearer to the archae- 
ologist : a kitchen of the primeval hunt- 
ers, its wall and hearth and calcined 
lime-stones bedded among laughing blue- 
bells. A brook's freshet, any March, 
may bring ashore a strange staff or neck- 
lace ; a rock is overturned under a yew^ 
tree, and discloses horns and knives elder 
than Clontarf. But yesterday, in a Car- 
low garden adjoining the ruins of a Butler 
fortress, put up at the time when Richard 
the Lionheart was looking with tears of 
envy over the walls of Jerusalem, closed 
urns were found in vaults, each with its 
shining dust : a tenantry long anterior to 
Christianity, and conscious perhaps, of 
Christian goings-on overhead, when The 
MacMorrough Kavanagh was pressed to 
dine with the Warden of the Black Castle, 
and slain among his followers at the 
pouring of the wine. There can be no 



IRISH 157 

other country so fatal to the antiqua- 
rian : for zest and labor are superfluous, 
and a long course of incomparable luck 
must drive him, for very satiety, from the 
field. 

Venerable Ireland has failed, as the 
world reckons failure. She cannot take 
prettily to her role of subjugated province. 
Abominably misruled, without a senate, 
without commerce, she has fallen back 
into the sullen interior hfe, into the deep 
night of reverie. From that brooding dark 
she has let leap no mxodern flame supremely 
great. For the great artist is not Irish, 
as yet, though with warm exaggerations, 
uncritical enthusiasms, affectionate encour- 
agements, her own exalt her own. As 
Goldsmith accused Dr. Johnson of doing, 
she lets her little fishes talk like whales. 
And this, of course, tends to no good : 
it only blunts the ideals of the populace, 
lowers the mark of achievement, and 
makes it difficult indeed for the true 
prince to be recognized in the hubbub of 
mistaken acclaim. The constituency of 
Aneurin and Ossian lacks a single sove- 
reign poet : a lack apparent enough to 
all but itself Verse, from of old, is per- 



158 IRISH 

vasive as dew or showers : but nowhere 
is it in process of crystallization. The per- 
secution of age-long ignorance, imposed 
upon a most intellectual people, is a mias- 
matic cloud not yet altogether withdrawn. 
Only in the best is Ireland perfect : in he- 
roes and in saints. In life, if not in art, 
we can sometimes do away with economy, 
restraint, equipose. We can hardly judge 
the epic figures of antiquity : but from 
Columba to "J. K. L.," from Hugh 
O'Neill and Sarsfield to Emmet and Lord 
Edward Fitzgerald, runs an endearing 
family likeness : scorn, pity, sweetness, 
disinterestedness, honor, power, brave ill 
luck, in them all. Most of these are 
rebels ; their names are under the baffling 
shadow of exile and the scaffold, and, 
alas, count for naught save in their 
mother's memory. 

" Where be thy gods, O Israel ? " The 
gibe comes with ill grace from the Eng- 
hsh. England has, by the world's cor- 
roboration, her divine sons, whose names 
are in benediction. But she has also a 
Sahara spectacle of the most stolid, empty 
folk in the universe : the sapless, rootless, 
flowerless millions who pay, as it were, for 



IRISH 159 

Shakespeare and Shelley, for Turner and 
Purcell, for Newton and Darwin. Easy, 
is it not, for the superlative quality to form 
and act, in fullest power here and there, 
in a nation where no smallest grain of it 
is ever wasted on the common mortal ? 
But Ireland reeks with genius impartially 
distributed. It is infectious ; every one 
suffers from it, in its various stages and 
manifestations. " The superior race " 
makes the superior individual impossible. 
There is no situation open to him ; he is 
notoriously siiperfluous : a coal brought 
to Newcastle. It is his lot to awake con- 
tradiction, and to be made to feel that he 
has no nominating committee behind him. 
He may be a great man in theory : but 
where every other man is demonstrably 
quite as great as he, he may be excused if 
he fails to move mountains. Eccentricity 
is in your Irishman's blood ; and organi- 
zation he hates and fears, perhaps through 
a dim consciousness that in organizations 
mental activities must be left to the lead- 
ers. If Celticism, with its insuperable 
charm, has never led the world in trade or 
war, can never so lead it, the cause is only 
that the units, which can hardly be said to 



i6o IRISH 

compose it, use their brains with unhal- 
lowed persistence. The most dashing 
spirited troops in Europe, the Irish are 
natural critics even of authority. Their 
successes are everywhere spasmodic : they 
juggle with success, they do not woo it 
to wife. In a career dramatically check- 
ered, it happens that their onset wins 
Fontenoy, and that their advice forfeits 
Culloden. 

It has been well said that the cultured 
classes are everywhere much the same, and 
that the true range of observation lies 
among the lowly and the poor. Now, no 
peasantry in the world furnishes such 
marked examples as does the Irish, of 
original speculation, accessibility to ideas. 
Threadbare old farmers and peddlers keep 
you in amused astonishment, and in an 
attitude of impious doubt towards the 
ascendancy of the trained thinker. You 
fall, nay, you run into cordial agreement 
with the suggestion of Tom Jones to the 
Ensign, " that it is as possible for a man 
to know something without having been at 
school, as it is to have been at school and 
to know nothing ! '* To handle the in- 
scrutable Celt on his own acres is to learn. 



IRISH i6i 

or at least to apprehend, the secret of a 
live resistance, incredibly prolonged, to a 
power almost wearied out with maintaining 
mastery. The sense of equity, the sense 
of humor itself, in the humblest and 
silentest Irishman, is armor enough against 
fate. He, the law-breaker, has compensa- 
tions which the law-makers wot not of, in 
his own ethic subtleties. His soul swells 
big with dreams. In his native village, 
he is rated sympathetically by the dream's 
size and duration, rather than, as in grosser 
communities, by the deed. The man is 
a trafficker in visions ; he becomes a 
cryptic mystery to his wife. She admires 
him for his madness, and has heard of 
fairy influences: ^^ satis est, it suffices," as 
old Burton oracularly says. Ah, well, the 
poor devil is with Fergus in his woodland 
car, when the rent comes due, and the 
crops are rotting in the rain ! He has no 
turn for temporalities, no ambition to rise ; 
yet in a pictorial sense, by the grace of 
God, or the witchcraft of the soil, he walks 
unique and illustrious. It is a memorable 
sight, this monstrous average and aggre- 
gate of whim. Nowhere the lonely plane- 
tary effulgence : everywhere the jovial 



1 62 IRISH 

defiant twinkle of little stars ! According 
to Emerson's sweet prediction, — 

" As half-gods go. 
The gods arrive." 

But in Ireland no clever half-god ever 
gets up to go, for the sake of any sequel. 
Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, 
noting the extreme nationalism of Cho- 
pin's genius, would have us mark that the 
same force of patriotism in an Italian, 
Frenchman, German, or Englishman, 
could not have promoted a similar result. 
Poland is a realm, he tells us, where racial 
traits remain intact, and uninfluenced 
from without : she is more esoterical than 
any state can be which is on the highway 
of Continental progress, in touch with 
to-morrow ; and therefore her expression 
in the arts is sure to be more individual, 
distinct, and striking. Ireland is such 
another spiritually isolated country. Her 
best utterance, or her least, is alike betray- 
ingly hers, to be scented among a thou- 
sand. And this homogeneity, in her case, 
is quite unaccountable, unless we accept as 
its explanation, the magnetic and absorb- 
ent quality in the strange isle itself, which 



IRISH 163 

has blended a dozen alien strains in one, 
and made of Scythian, Erse, Norse, Iber- 
ian, the Norman, the Dane, the English 
of the Pale, the Huguenot, and the horde 
of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers, 
something " more Irish than the Irish." 
And in Poland, again, the aristocracy, 
though malcontent and impoverished, for 
honor's sake, maintains its own traditions 
in its own station, as the feudal vassals 
maintain theirs. But the genuine Irish 
gentry is extinct, or utterly transformed, 
on its ancient acres. The original peasant 
stock has all but perished from famines 
and immigrations. Most significant of all, 
what remains of the two, blends as in no 
other European territory. The peasants 
were long ago driven from the estate of 
free clansmen ; the gentry, who would 
neither conform nor flee, were crushed 
into the estate of peasants, by the penal 
laws of the Protestant victor, which made 
education treason ; by the most hateful 
code, as Lord Chief Justice Coleridge 
named it, framed since the beginning of 
the world : and one class impacted on the 
other, as mortar among stones, became 



1 64 IRISH 

indistinguishable in a generation. Time, 
which was expected to bring about No 
Ireland, has in reality engendered a na- 
tional life more intense than ever. The 
physical strength, the patience and pas- 
sion, of the common people ; the grace, 
loyalty, and play of thought of gentlemen, 
have in that national life come together. 
Unique patrician wit, delicacy of feeling, 
knightly courtesy, have run out of their 
allotted conduits, and they color the speech 
of beggars. Distinction of all sorts sprouts 
in the unlikeliest places. Violent Erin 
produces ever and anon the gentlest phil- 
osopher ; recluse Erin sends forth the 
consummate cosmopolitan; hunted and 
jealous Erin holds up on its top stalk 
the open lily of liberality, 

— " courteous, facile, sweet. 
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride." 

Ireland is at work in every department 
of every civilization : it is a seed-shed- 
ding, an aroma, intangible as April. No 
pioneer post, no remote wave, no human 
enterprise from Algiers to Peru, but can 
answer for it, ill or well. Yet none know 



IRISH 165 

whether Ireland itself is at this hour a mere 
menace of terrible import, like Samson, 
or ready, another Odysseus, to throw off 
disguises, and draw, at home, " in Tara's 
halls," the once familiar bow. Its own 
future, in its own altered valleys, is hidden. 
The tragic cloud hangs there. Forebod- 
ing, unrest, are stamped on the very water 
and sky, and on proud sensitive faces. It 
was on a day in spring, in sight of Wick- 
low headlands, the Golden Spears of long 
ago ; — a day when primroses and celan- 
dine and prodigal furze splashed the hill- 
sides, down to the rocks where fishers 
sat mending nets, and stitching tawny 
sails ; when there was a sense of over- 
hanging heights, and green inlands, and 
ruined abbeys whose stone warriors sleep 
in hearing of the surf, and of huge crom- 
lech, fairy rath, and embattled wall, long 
and low, looking sadly down ; when the 
shadows in that cold enchanted air at 
sea, fringing every sapphire bay, chased 
from silver through carmine to purple, 
and back again ; — on such a day of ca- 
price and romance, the true day of the 
Gael, a woman beautiful as the young 



1 66 IRISH 

Deirdre said to a stranger, walking the 
clifF-path at her side : " No : we have 
never been conquered : we are unconquer- 
able. But we are without hope." 

1889. 



An Open Letter to the Moon 



AN OPEN LETTER TO THE 
MOON 



" To THE Celestial and my Soul's Idol, 
THE Most Beautified " : — 

IT might appear to us an imperative, 
though agreeable duty, most high and 
serene Madame, to waft towards you, 
occasionally, a transcript of our humble 
doings on this nether planet, were we not 
sure, in the matter of friendly understand- 
ing, that we opened correspondence long 
ago. You were one of our earliest fami- 
liars. You stood in • that same office to 
our fathers and mothers, back to your 
sometime contemporary, Adam of the ' 
Garden ; and while we are worried into 
acquiescence with the inevitable design of 
age, we are more pleased than envious to 
discover that you grow never old to the 
outward eye, and that you appear the 
same "lovesome ladie bright," as when 



I70 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 

we first stared at you from a babe's pillow. 
You are acquainted, not by hearsay, but 
by actual evidence, with the family history, 
having seen what sort of figure our ances- 
tors cut, and being infinitely better aware 
of the peculiarities of the genealogical 
shrub than we can ever be. Therefore 
we make no reference to a matter so 
devoid of novelty. But we do mean 
to free our minds frankly on the subject 
of your Ladyship's own behavior. We 
take this resolve to be no breach of that 
exalted courtesy which befits us, no less 
than you, in your skyey station. 

We have in part, lost our ancient re- 
spect for you : a sorry fact to chronicle. 
There were once various statements float- 
ing about our cradle, complimentary to your 
supposed virtues. You were Phoebe, twin 
to Phoebus : a queen, having a separate es- 
tablishment, coming into a deserted court 
by night, and kindling it into more than 
daytime revelry. You were an enchant- 
ress, the tutelary divinity of water-sprites 
and greensward fairies. Your presence was 
indispensable for felicitous dreams. To 
be moonstruck, then, meant to be charmed 
inexpressibly, to be lifted off our feet. 



OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 171 

Now, we allow that you have suffered 
by misrepresentation, or else are we right 
in detecting your arts ; for, by all your 
starry handmaidens, you are not what we 
took you to be ! We are informed (our 
quondam faith in you beshrews the day 
we learned to read ! ) that you are a timid 
dependent only of the sun, afraid to show 
yourself while he is on his peregrinations ; 
that you slyly steal the garb of his splen- 
dor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith 
in your borrowed finery. That you are 
no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor 
to housebreakers ; conspirator in many 
direful deeds, attending base nocturnal 
councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself 
against the law. " Let us be Diana's for- 
esters, gentlemen of the shade, . . . gov- 
erned, as the sea is, by our noble and 
chaste mistress, the moon, under whose 
countenance we — steal." That your gos- 
sip is the ominous owl, and not Titania. 
Your inconstancy, to come on delicate 
ground, shineth above your other charac- 
teristics. Since we have seen your color 
come and go, we surmise that there is no 
dearth of intrigue and repartee up there ; 
and in a red or a grey veil, you masquer- 



172 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 

ade periodically, at unseasonable hours. 
Of painting your complexion we are dis- 
posed to acquit you ; yet it is a severe 
blow to us to learn, from the most trust- 
worthy sources, that you wax. 

Selene, Artemis ! you are worldly be- 
yond worldlings. We hear that you have 
quarters, and that you jingle them trium- 
phantly in the ears of Orion, who is no- 
body but a poor hunter. Beware of the 
exasperation of the lower classes ! whose 
awakening is what we call below a French 
Revolution. Who, indeed, that hath a 
mote in his eye, cannot still discern a huge 
beam in yours ? Have you no resident 
missionary ? for you persist in obstinate 
schisms, and flaunt that exploded Orien- 
talism, the crescent, in the teeth of Christ- 
endom. You are much more distant and 
reserved, O beguiler ! than you pretend. 
Your temper is said to be volcanic. 

You that were Diana ! who is the Fal- 
staffian, Toby Belchian, Kriss Kringlish 
person to be seen about your premises ? 
He hangeth his great ruddy comfortable 
phiz out of your casements, and holdeth 
it sidewise with a wink or a leer, hav- 
ing never yet found his rhyming way to 



OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 173 

Norwich. We look on him as an offi- 
cious rascal. He peereth where you only, 
by privilege, have permission to enter. He 
hath the evil eye. He thinketh himself a 
proper substitute for you, and King of the 
Illuminari ; he reproduceth your smile, 
and scattereth your largesses ; he maketh 
faces (we say it shudderingly) at your 
worshippers below. Frequently hath he 
appropriated kisses that were blown to you 
personally, or consigned to you for de- 
livery, from one sweetheart to another. 

O Lady, O Light-dispenser, think, we 
hereby beseech you, of the danger of his 
being taken for you ! Picture the discom- 
fiture of your minstrel, who, intoning a 
rapturous recital of your charms, and cast- 
ing about for a sight of your delectable 
loveliness, is confronted, instead, with that 
broad ingenuous vagabond ! In some 
such despairing rage as the minstrel's, 
must have been the inventor of the Ger- 
man tongue, who discarded all other 
chances of observation after once behold- 
ing this thing, ycleped your Man, and 
angrily insisted on " Der Mond," — the 
Moon, he — as the proper mode of 
speech. I cite you this from old John 



174 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 

Lyly : " There liveth none under the 
sunne that know what to make of the 
man in the moon." We clamor at you 
from the throats of the fivQ races : Abol- 
ish him, or at least, depose the present 
incumbent, and get you straightway some 
acceptable minion, one of more chivalric 
habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior ! 
Your credit and our comfort demand it. 
" Pray you, remember." 

What scenes. Cosmopolite, Circumnavi- 
gator, Universahst, have you beheld : 
what joy, what plenty, what riot and 
desolation ! You are the arch-spectator. 
Death sees not half so widely. He lurk- 
eth like an anxious thief in the crowd, 
seeking what he may take away. But 
your bland leisurely eye looketh down 
disinterestedly on all. Caravans rested 
thrice a thousand years ago beneath you 
in the desert ; Assyrian shepherds chanted 
to you with their long-hushed voices ; the 
south wind, while the infant world fell 
into its first slumber, leaped up and played 
with you in Paradise. You have known 
the chaos before man, and yet we saw you 
laugh upon last April's rain. Are there 
none for whom you are lonely through 



OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 175 

the ages ? Are there not centuries of old 
delight in your memory, unequalled now ? 
faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose 
you still yearn to shine? Do you miss 
the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten 
the beginners of the " star-ypointing pyra- 
mid " ? Can you not tell us a tale of the 
Visigoth ? How sang Blondel against the 
prison door? How brawny was Bajazet ? 
How fair was Helen ; Semiramis, how 
cruel? Moon! where be the treasures 
of the doughty Kidd ? 

You, Cynthia and Hecate, sweet Lady 
of Ghosts and guardian of the under- 
world, have been fed upon the homage of 
mortal lips : you have had praises from 
the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. 
Many a time have we rehearsed before 
you such as we recall, from the sigh of 
Enobarbus: — 

* ' O sovereign mistress of true melancholy ! ' * 

to the hymnal 

"Orbed maiden, with white fire laden," 

of the noble salutation of a mirthful- 
mournful spirit: 



176 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 

" Oh ! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be. 
Huntress or Dian, or whatever named ; 
And he the veriest pagan, that first framed 
His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee." 

Have we not sung oft that strophe of 
Ben Jonson'sj full of inexpressible music 
to our ear? 

'Lay thy bow of pearl apart 
And thy crystal shining quiver ; 
Give unto the flying hart 
Space to breathe, how short soever. 
Thou that mak' st a day of night, 
Goddess excellently bright ! ' ' 

and the beloved rhymeless cadence of old 
Jasper Fisher's drama, beginning: — 

*' Thou queen of Heaven, commandress of the deep, 
Lady of lakes, regent of woods and deer. ' ' 

Sidney, Drummond, Milton, glorified your 
wanderings. And your truest votary, one 
John Keats, spake out boldly that 

— " the oldest shade midst oldest trees 
Feels palpitations when thou lookest in." 

You are an incorrigible charmer : but as 
he reports you likewise as 

— ** a relief 
To the poor, patient oyster, where he sleeps 
Within his pearly house,'* 



OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 177 

we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that 
you have set up as a humanitarian. 

Now, we venture to assert that you 
remember compliments meant to be of 
the same Orphic strain, and inscribed 
to you, of which we are not wholly guilt- 
less. We have all but knelt to you, with 
the Libyan. The primeval heathen has 
stirred within us. We have been under 
the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be 
a Moonshee, rather than any potentate 
of this universe. Have we not followed 
you, O " planet of progression ! '* all our 
bright, volatile, restless, tide-like days ? 
We wound you not with the analytic 
eye, nor startle you with telescopes. The 
scepticisms of astronomy enter not into 
our rubric. Are you not comely ? Do 
you not spiritualize the darkness with one 
touch of your pale garment ? Then what 
are they to us, your dimensions and your 
distances ? Gross vanity of knowledge ! 
Mere abuse of privilege ! 

If we affect the abusive, shy of more 
ceremonious forms of address, forgive us, 
Luna. We make recantation, and disown 
our banter. We extend the hand of cor- 
diality even to your month-old Man. 



178 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 

How blithe and beauteous he is ! He is 
embodied Gentihty. We bow to him as 
your anointed Viceroy, your illustrious 
Nuncio. You know our immemorial 
loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you 
so late to doubt it. 

** Da Luna proper e novcs. 
Da metis media , da, puer ! ' ' 

Forgive us, benignant, peaceful, affable, 
propitious Moon. Poet are we not, nor 
lunatic, nor lover ; " but that we love thee 
best, O Most Best ! beheve it." 



885. 



The Under Dog 



THE UNDER DOG 



WHAT a pity a memoir cannot be 
written without regard to its alleged 
incidents ! Annalists are naturally the 
slaves of what happens ; and that glows 
between them and the eternal, like gor- 
geous-colored minster glass, a spurious 
man-made heaven. A written Life may 
be true to fact and false to law, even as a 
lived life may be so. It is utterly impos- 
sible for the most philosophic among us 
to know, to judge, or even to speculate, 
in behalf of any but himself. A word, a 
risk, a blunder, the breadth of a hair, the 
difference betwixt the two Kings of Brent- 
ford, lifts the obscure into apparent great- 
ness, or forbids the potentially greater to 
descend to that table-land where there is 
no mist, where human senses come into 
play, and where he may become a sub- 
ject for the approbation of history. In 
whatsoever degree a creature is burdened 



1 82 THE UNDER DOG 

with conscience and stiffened with will, his 
course must be continuously deflected by 
countless little secret interior collisions 
and readjustments, which have final cumu- 
lative influence on what we call his char- 
acter and his achievement. The means to 
this end are nowhere discoverable, unless 
in a perfect autobiography, and under the 
eye of the perfect reader. Fate must 
have her joke sometimes, as well as the 
least of us, and she suffers cheap energy 
to fill the newspapers for a lustrum, and 
genius to await > identification at the 
morgue. These are truisms, but here is 
truth: in nine hundred and ninety-nine 
instances out of a thousand, it is folly to 
name any success or failure as such ; for 
either is a mystery, and the fairest evi- 
dences by which we can form an opinion of 
it are altogether and irremediably fallacious. 
Now, what has often used up and ended 
a man's vital force, is some constraint 
much more significant than that of early 
death, a constraint sought and willingly 
undergone. His own moral weakness 
stopped Coleridge ; but Erasmus might 
have uttered with Sidney : 

" My life melts with too much thinking.** 



THE UNDER DOG 183 

Socrates, it will be remembered " cor- 
rupted the Athenian youth." Not one of 
them he moulded or breathed upon, except 
the transient pupil Alcibiades, turned his 
hand cordially to the practical, or ramped 
in the civic china-shop. What ghost is 
it which certain minds see upon the way, 
and which lessens their destined momen- 
tum ? Something extra-rational, we may 
be sure : something with an august en- 
chantment. They act under the impulse 
of an heroic fickleness, and forsake a 
known and very good result for " the 
things that are more excellent." The 
spectators can only wonder ; the crucial 
third act has passed swiftly and in silence 
behind the curtain, and the rest of the 
drama sounds perverted and confused. 
A mere secular enthusiasm may have the 
power to draw a career to itself, absorb 
and devour it, and keep it shut forever 
from the chance of distinction in selfish 
and pleasant ways. But what shall be 
said for those who have become impas- 
sioned of the supernatural, beholding it in 
amaze, as Hubert the hunter beheld the 
holy sign between the antlered brows in 
the Aquitanian forest : a sight enough to 



1 84 THE UNDER DOG 

stay them and carry them out of them- 
selves, and change what was their pros- 
pect, because " the former things are 
passed away ? " What of the allegiance 
to a cause, the espousal of hunger and 
thirst, the wilderness, and the scaffold, in 
the hope, never ultimately in vain, of 
awakening and bettering the world ? " If 
the law require you to be the agent of in- 
justice to another," wrote Thoreau, in his 
good manful essay on John Brown, " then 
I say to you, break the law. Let your 
life be a friction to stop the machine." 
Even thus have many gone under, of 
whom no audiences have heard, but whose 
love and wisdom feed the race, century 
after century. In our reckoning of the 
saints, we lose sight of half their meaning ; 
for we cannot guess accurately which of 
them has lost most, humanly and aestheti- 
cally, nor how much any one individual 
has lost, by his chosen concentration on 
matters in which there is no general com- 
petition, and where there can be no estab- 
lished canons of criticism. Some saints, 
in a double sense, follow their vocations ; 
they attain their only legitimate develop- 
ment in the cloister. But others are 



THE UNDER DOG 185 

saints at a sacrifice. An infinite number 
of men and women, painfully approxi- 
mating moral perfection, lose, either grad- 
ually, or at once and forever, in that 
supreme compensation, their aptitude for 
common affairs. " Ejiciebas eas^ et intrahas 
pro eisy omne voluptate dulcioVy^ says the 
son of Monica's tears, himself gloriously 
stricken out from the pagan roll of 
honor. 

Such as these have outgrown their own 
existence ; they become impalpable to the 
general apprehension ; they have sold the 
mess of pottage again for the birthright of 
the sons of God. And God, in the auda- 
cious old phrase, has " destroyed " them. 
What they bade fair to be, or what they 
could have done, before they were crippled 
by vigils and visions, rolls back into the 
impossible and the unimagined. We 
have no clue to alienated souls ; we can 
compute with those solely, who, as we 
say, get along and amount to something ; 
and we seldom perceive what purely for- 
tuitous reputations, what mere bright flot- 
sam and jetsam, accidentally uppermost, 
are those whom we set first in a fixed 
place, and cry up as exemplars in art. 



1 86 THE UNDER DOG 

trade, and policy. For what might have 
been is not this crass world's concern : 
her absent have no rights. The spiritual 
man is likely to be possessed of a divine 
\ indolence ; would he strive, he is hamp- 
\ ered and thwarted by the remembrance, 
^ or the forecast, of whiter ideals in Para- 
dise. It is sometimes urged as a reproach 
against the courteous Latin nations that 
they lag behind in modern progressive- 
ness ; that they do not, like the Border 
lads, " march forward in order." The 
reproach is, at bottom, a deHcate and ex- 
quisite compliment. With genius in their 
blood, and beauty never far from their 
hand, what wonder if they continue to 
be careless about rapid transit ? 

** I have seen higher, holier things than these. 
And therefore must to these refuse my heart.'* 

The endearing fable of elf-shot or be- 
witched children, little goose-girls waylaid 
on the hillside by fairies in green and 
silver, and enticed away, and set free 
after a while, though with the dream and 
the blight ever upon them, is, like most 
fables, deep as immortahty. The mystic 
has already gone too far, and seen too 



THE UNDER DOG 187 

much ; he is useless at the plough : he is, 
as it were, one citizen less. The fine 
lines just quoted are from an expert in 
inaction, the poet who, among all others 
with an equal equipment in English 
letters, may be named pre-eminently as 
a failure: Arthur Hugh Clough. Let 
his lovers proclaim as much with gentle 
irony. Most poets, it may be, are heroes 
spoiled ; they know somewhat of the un- 
known, and suffer from it ; the usual 
measure of their esoteric worth must still 
be the measure of their mundane imprac- 
ticability : like Hamlet, they have seen 
spirits, and forswear deeds for phrases. 
Artists and thinkers, in fact, must out- 
wardly follow the profession of the queen 
bee, not as yet with honor, nor by general 
request. But they are omens ; they are, 
let us hope, the type and the race, the 
segregated non-cohesive thing, the pro- 
test which counts. The noblest of them 
is least in love with civilization and its 
awards ; but what they have not hoarded 
for themselves, strangers hoard for them ; 
and because success is most truly to them 
a thing foregone, therefore they prevail 
forever. If they have not " made a liv- 



1 88 THE UNDER DOG 

ing," they have, in the opinion of a young 
Governor of Massachusetts, a philosopher 
not of the Franklin breed, — "made a 
life." 



893- 



Quiet London 



QUIET LONDON 

¥ 

IF one had to try his hand at the eternal 
parallel of London and Paris (next 
weariest, in the scale of human compa- 
risons, to that between D s and 

T y), or, indeed, of London with any 

city of known size, it might be said, in a 
word, that the chief variance between them 
is a variance of sound : and that under 
this, and expressed by it, — " alas, how 
told to them who felt it never ? " as 
Dante sighs over the abstruse sweetness 
of his lady, — is a profound spiritual dif- 
ference. Whatever tradition may say of 

— "the chargeable noise of this great town," 

its instructed inhabitant knows it by strange 
whispers, meek undertones. Conceive 
anything more diverting than that a mon- 
strous awe-engendering institution like the 
*bus should be almost as deft and as still 
as a humming-bird ! Monosyllables, and 



192 QUIET LONDON 

pipe-smoke, and sciential collecting of 
fares make up the rolling van masculine ; 
ever and anon the less certain step and 
the swish of a skirt on the lurching stair, 
announce to the heroes of the serene 
height that 

" Helen is come upon the wall to see.'' 

With perfect skill, with masterful rapidity, 
the wheels slide over surfaces smooth as 
an almond-shell, in a mere ballroom jingle 
and rustle. Cabs are dragon-flies by- 
day, and glowworms by night ; they dart, 
noiseless, from north to west. Even the 
tuft-footed dray-horses vanish with such 
reverberation as might follow Cinderella's 
coach. Exquisite voices of children, soft 
and shy, fall like the plash of water on* 
the open paths of the Parks. In the vis- 
cid openings of alleys off the Strand, in 
the ancient astonishing tinkerdom of 
Leather Lane, where villainous naphtha 
torches light up the green lettuce on 
peddler's carts, the pawnbroker's golden 
balls significant above, and a knot of 
Hogarth faces in the Saturday evening 
flare, — there also, are the cockney gamins 
with honey-bright hair : profiles which cor- 



QUIET LONDON 193 

roborate Millais' brush, and illustrate a 
lovely phrase of Mistral in Mireio, "cou- 
leur de joue ; " flushed little legs in ragged 
socks, which have piteously set out on the 
dark thoroughfares of life ; voices, above 
all, which have often a low harp-like tone 
not to be heard elsewhere out of drawing- 
rooms. It is as if tremendous London, 
her teeming thoughts troubling her, said 
" Hush ! '' in the ear of all her own. 
Hyde Park orators are seldom brawlers ; 
immense crowds, out for sight-seeing, are 
controlled by the gentlest of police, who 
say " Please,'' and are obeyed. Few stop 
to salute or exchange a word at the shel- 
ters. This is no experimental or village- 
ous world: one man's affairs are in India, 
another's on the deep sea, and a third's in 
a cradle three stories up. Sidneys and 
pickpockets intermingle, each on a non- 
communicated errand. Here whisks a 
Turk, in his extraordinary unnoticed 
dress ; and yonder, a sprout of a man who 
might have been bow-legged, had he any 
legs at all : nothing new goes at its value, 
nothing strange begets comment. The 
long-distance ironies, or intelligential buzz 
of street-life in New York, where folk go 
13 



194 QUIET LONDON 

two and two, are here foreign and trans- 
atlantic indeed. The even pavements 
drink in all that might mean concussion, 
the soft golden air deadens it, the preoc- 
cupied seriousness of the human element 
contradicts and forbids it. An awful, en- 
dearing, melancholy stillness broods over 
the red roofs of High. Holborn, and 
hangs, like a pale cloud, on the spires of 
the Strand, and the yellow-lustred plane 
tree of Cheapside : gigantic forces seem 
trooping by, like the boy-god Harpo- 
crates, finger on lip. The hushing rain, 
from a windless sky, falls in sheets of 
silver on gray, gray on violet, violet on 
smouldering purple, and anon makes 
whole what it had hardly riven : the veil 
spun of nameless analogic tints, which 
brings up the perspective of every road, 
the tapestry of sun-shot mist which Theo- 
phile Gautier admired once with all his 
eye. The town wears the very color of 
silence. No one can say of S. Paul's that 
it is a talking dome, despite the ironic 
accident of the whispering gallery in the 
interior. Like Wordsworth upon Hel- 
vellyn, in Haydon's odd memorable por- 
trait, it sees with drooped eyes, and exhorts 



QUIET LONDON 195 

with grand reticences and abstractions. 
Mighty stone broods above, on either 
hand, its curiously beautiful draperies of 
soot furled over the brow, in the posture 
of the speechless martyrs of Attic tragedy. 
There is an alchemic atmosphere in Lon- 
don, which interdicts one's perception of 
ugliness. At the angles of the grimiest 
places, choked with trade, we stumble on 
little old bearded graveyards, pools of 
ancestral sleep ; or low-lying leafy gardens 
where monks and guildsmen have had 
their dream : closes inexpressibly preg- 
nant with peace, the caesural pauses of our 
loud to-day. Nothing in the world is so 
remote, so pensive, so musty-fragrant of 
long ago, as the antique City churches 
where the dead are the only congregation ; 
where the effigies of Rahere the founder. 
Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, John Gower, 
and our old friend Stow are awake, in their 
scattered neighborhoods, to make the re- 
sponses ; and where the voices of the daily 
choir, disembodied by the unfilled space 
about, breathe ghostly four-part Amens, to 
waver like bubbles up and down the aisles. 
And to go thence into the highway creates 
no great jar. The tide there is always at 



196 QUIET LONDON 

the flood, and frets not. The perfectly- 
ordered traffic, its want of blockade and 
altercation, the sad-colored, civil-mannered 
throng, the dim hght and the wet gleam, 
make it as natural to be absent-minded at 
Charing Cross as in the Abbey. Shelley- 
must have found it so ; else whence his 
simile, 

**The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's." 

There is no congestion of the populace ; 
yet the creeks and coves of that ancient 
sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour 
after hour, century after century, as if in 
subjection to a fixed moon. It is the very 
poise of energy, the aggregation of so 
much force that all force is at a standstill ; 
the miraculous moment, indefinitely pro- 
longed, when achieved fruition becalms 
itself at the full, and satiety hesitates to 
set in. A subdued mighty hum, as of 
" the loom of time,** London lacks not ; 
but a crass explosion never breaks it. 
The imponderable quiet of the vast capi- 
tal completes her inscrutable charm. She 
has the eflfect of a muted orchestra on ears 
driven mad with the horrible din of new 
America. As still as her deep history on 



QUIET LONDON 197 

library shelves, so still are her pace and her 
purpose to-day : her grave passing, would, 
like Lincoln in camp, discourage applause. 
Everywhere is the acoustically perfect 
standpoint. The cosmic currents ripple 
audibly along. 

'* Therein I hear the Parcas reel 
The threads of life at the spinning-wheel. 
The threads of life and power and pain." 

Coal-smoke and river-fog are kind to the 
humanist. They build his priory cell, 
where he can sit and work on his illumi- 
nations, and know that he lays his colors 
true. " The man, sir, who is tired of 
London," said the great Doctor, in one 
of his profound generalities, " is tired of 
life." 

At certain hours, the City is tenantless, 
and sunrise or sunset, touching the vidual 
tower of All Hallows Staining, gives it the 
pearl and carmine tints of a shell. At 
such a time you may wander in the very 
luxury of loneliness, from London Bridge 
to Lambeth, watching the long yards 
swing at their moorings by the palace wall, 
and Thames running tiger-coated to sea ; 
and from the Gray's Inn limes pass on 



198 QUIET LONDON 

to an unvisited and noble old bronze of 
an inconsiderable Stuart, lustrous from 
the late shower, beyond whom are the 
forgotten water-stairs of Whitehall, above 
whom is his own starlit weather-vane, 
with " the Protestant wind still blowing." 
Where the Boar's Head was, where the 
Roman Baths are, in strange exchanges of 
chronology, where, in a twinkle, the mer- 
chants and journalists shall be, are the de- 
populated presence-halls in which you are 

" In dreams a king, but waking, no such matter." 

All that was temporal in them has been 
swallowed by the wave of the generations 
of men who are no more. Poet by poet, 
from the beginning, has known the look 
of London's void heart at night, and has 
had, next it, his keenest gust of sover- 
eignty, on jealous marches when his own 
footfall is soft as a forest creature's, for 
fear of man and of mortal interruption. 
The living are gone for the moment : 
the dead and their greatness are " nearer 
than hands and feet." The divinest 
quality of this colossal calm, " mirk miles 
broad," is that, to the sensitive mind, it is 
a magic glass for musings. In such a 



QUIET LONDON 199 

mysterious private depth Narcissus saw 
himself, and died of his own beauty. 
The few who have had eternity most in 
mind, have worshipped London most ; 
and their passion, read of in biographies, 
has expanded, insensibly, the imagination 
of the many./ The terror of the vast 
town lies on iny thoughtful spirit ; but 
without some touch or other of golden 
casuistry, of neo-Platonism, none can sin- 
cerely adore her. For the adorable in her 
is man's old adoration itself, breathed 
forth and crystallized. That indeed, is 
the everlasting delight : London has noth- 
ing so simple in her bosom as instinctive 
charm. She is the dear echo, the dear 
mirror, of humanity. The Charles Lamb 
who was wont to relieve his tender over- 
burdened spirit by a plunge in the surging 
crowd, and who was not ashamed that he 
had wept there, " for fulness of joy at so 
much life," might be the first to apply to the 
majestic and bitter mother who bred him, 
the illumining line of Alfred de Musset : 

*' Car sa beaute pournous, c^est notre amour pour elie.^^ 

She gives us freedom, recollection, rever- 
ence ; and we attribute to her the sweet- 



200 QUIET LONDON 

ness of our own dispositions at her knee. 
Blessing us with her silence, the glad in- 
credible thing, she lets us believe we have 
discovered it, as a fresh secret between 
lover and lover. 

On Sundays, too, the dreary English 
Sundays of old complaint, what idyllic 
opportunity wastes itself at the door ! 
Hampstead and Blackheath are efflores- 
cent with the populace, but dark London 
wears her troth-plight ring of meditation. 
Her church-bells, indeed, speak : there is 
a new one at every turning, like the suc- 
cession of perfumes as you cross a con- 
servatory, and felt as a discord no more 
than these. Good to hear are the chimes 
of S. Giles Cripplegate, the aged bells of S. 
Helen, with their grace-notes and falHng 
thirds, the great octave-clash of Wren's 
cathedral, which booms and sprays like 
the sea on the chalk-clifFs almost within 
its sight. And the ghosts are out again 
under the eaves of Little Britain and 
Soho. It is usually on Sundays, or at 
night, that you may view the young Cow- 
ley (curled up, among the geraniums, on 
the window-ledge of the Elizabethan house 
next S. Dunstan's-in-the-West) reading 



QUIET LONDON 201 

Spenser, his light bronze curls curtaining 
the folio page ; and a figure of uncon- 
temporaneous look, coming heavily from 
the Temple gateway, almost opposite, 
with a black band on his sleeve, is saying 
brokenly to himself: "Poor Goldy was 
wild, very wild ; but he is so no more^" 

The elective London of choicest com- 
panionship, of invited sights and sounds, 
of imperial privacy, is always open to the 
explorer : " London small and white and 
clean," walled and moated, fairer than she 
ever was at any one time, warless, religious, 
pastoral, where hares may course along 
the friendly highway, and swans breast the 
unpolluted Fleet. Like the gods, you 
may, if you will, apprehend all that has 
ever been, at a glance, and out of that all, 
seize the little which is perfect and durable, 
and live in it : " in the central calm at the 
heart of agitation." By so much as Lon- 
don and her draggled outer precincts are 
bulging and vile, and her mood stupid, 
cruel, and senseless, victory is the larger 
for having found here a spiritual parterre 
of perpetual green. And it is, perhaps, 
owing to . respect towards those who yet 
believe in her, whose presence imposes 



202 gUIET LONDON 

upon her, in romantic tyranny, the re- 
membrance of what she has been to her 
saints, that she does, in reality, walk 
softly, speak low, as if her life-long orgies 
were fabulous, and wear, to her faithful 
lover, the happy innocent look becoming 
the young Republic of Selected Peace. 
Donne's subtly beautiful cry is ever in his 
ear : 

" O stay heere! for to thee 
England is only a worthy gallerie 
To walk in Expectation: till from thence 
Our greatest King call thee to His presence.'* 

O stay here ! Who would not be such a 

city's citizen ^ 

1890. 



The Captives 



THE CAPTIVES 

THE lions at the Zoo " bring sad 
thoughts to the mind": they chiefly, 
for they are the most impressive figures 
among our poor hostages. The pretty 
moons of color, cream or bronze, pulsat- 
ing along their tawny sides, seem but so 
many outer ripples of a heart-ache subtle 
enough to move your own. Couchant, 
with a droop of the bearded chest, or 
erect, with an eternal restless four steps 
and back again, they drag thro; gh, in 
public, their defeated days. It is incon- 
ceivable that we should attach the idea of 
depravity to a lion. Surely, it is no count 
against him that he can kill those of us 
who are adjacent, and juicy ! In the 
roomy name of reciprocity, why not? 
Yet what he can do, he leaves undone. 
A second glance at him corrects inherited 
opinion : 

*'I trow that countenance cannot lie." 



2o6 THE CAPTIVES 

Benignity sits there, and forbearance ; else 
we know not what such things mean. 
Those golden eyes, pools of sunlit water, 
make one remember no blood-curdling 
hap ; but rather the gracious legendry of 
long ago : how a lion buried the Chris- 
tian penitent in the lone Egyptian sands, 
and another gambolled in the thronged 
Coliseum, kissing the feet of the Chris- 
tian youth, when the task laid upon him, 
in his hunger, was to rend his body in 
twain. Something about the lion reminds 
one of certain sculptured Egyptian faces. 
This great intellectual mildness, when 
blended with enormous power (power 
which in him must be expressed physi- 
cally, or we were too dull to feel it), 
appears to some merely sly and sinister. 
Incredible goodness we label as hypocrisy. 
For the ultimate quality in the expression 
of the lion is its sweetness. He may be, 
as one hears him called, the king of brutes, 
but the gentleman among brutes he is, 
beyond a doubt. He has tolerance, dig- 
nity, and an oak-leaf cleanliness. With 
passing accuracy, Landor or WilHam Mor- 
ris, is often described as " leonine " ; but 
the real lion-men of England are the thin 



THE CAPTIVES 207 

and mild dynamos : Pitt, Newman, Nel- 
son. In these are the long austere lines 
of the cheek, the remote significant gaze, 
the look of inscrutable purpose and 
patience. As Theseus says, smiling upon 
his Hippolyta, of the lion in the masque 
of the Midsummer Nighf s Dream : " A very 
gentle beast, and of a good conscience." 

Year after year, so long as the splen- 
did creatures are cheapened " to make a 
Roman holiday,*' they move not so much 
under protest as with black sullen fatalism. 
We have all seen them rise to the lash in 
the hands of a spangled circus female, who 
must end, forsooth, by inserting her po- 
matumed head in their too-enduring jaws ; 
and it is not unusual for them to spring 
at the just-closed door, with the fell 
strength of that soft and terrible left fore- 
paw. Their action is, of course, perfunc- 
tory ; and since they are notoriously 
brave, and not to be cowed, obedience 
in them has a strange pathos. They are 
trained to sit up, and roll barrels, and 
fire cannon, and jump hoops ; yes, even 
to scowl and swear, to the terror of 
"men, women and Herveys," between 
the scenes of their bitter comedy ; yet the 



20 8 THE CAPTIVES 

clown's circumstance cannot touch a hair 
of those mournful magnific heads. Their 
sleep is broken with poked umbrellas, and 
a patter of foolish nuts and cookies ; and, 
from a dream of the fragrant jungles and 
the torrents of home, they come anew 
upon the cyclorama of human faces, and 
the babble of foreign tongues. They live 
no longer from hand to mouth, as they do 
in their native haunts ; their needs, nay, 
their whims, are studied and gratified; 
they serve painters, naturalists, school- 
boys ; they give employment ; they call 
forth thought, love, courage. And many 
sympathizers and well-wishers are short- 
sighted enough to congratulate caged 
animals, and think them happily circum- 
stanced. Your point of view depends, 
perhaps, on how much passion for out- 
of-doors, for solitude, is in your own 
blood ; and on your sense of the 
lengths to which human interference may 
go with the works of God. We give these 
lives subjected to our laudable curiosity, 
strange exchanges : for moss knee-deep, 
and the dews and aroma of the woody 
ground, a raised sawdust floor ; and for 
an outlook through craggy glens. 



THE CAPTIVES 209 

" Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras 
of leaves," 

a whitewashed wall nine feet high, a 
stucco sky which has not the look of 
Nubia, nor Barbary, nor Arabia, any 
more. 

Our father Adam is said to have dwelt 
in peace with all the beasts in his Garden. 
And there is no evidence in the Mosaic 
annals that it was they who became per- 
verted, and broke faith with man ! Marry, 
man himself, in the birth of his moral 
ugliness, set up the hateful division, es- 
tranged these inestimable friends, and 
then, unto everlasting, pursues, maligns, 
subjugates, and kills the beings braver, 
shrewder, and more innocent than he. 
He has wrested from its beautiful meaning 
his "dominion over them.'' Power made "~1 
him tyrannous, and tyranny bred in its ^ 

victims hate and revenge and fear, and 
from the footfall of man all creation flees 
away, unless, indeed, as in Swift's most 
telling allegory, where the cultured Hou- 
yhnhnms may succeed in subjecting the 
Yahoos. For man alone is the fallen 
angel of the lower order : 

"The King, from height of all his painted glory," 
14 



2IO THE CAPTIVES 

has sunk into vulgar dreams of coercion, 
breathing dual impiety against his Maker 
and his mates. Save him, there is no 
other perverted animal ; not one clad 
otherwise, or minded otherwise, than his 
archetype. Men in sealskins ; women 
in swansdown, with heron-aigrettes ; chil- 
dren in cocoon-spun silk, their hands 
and feet in strange sheathings torn from 
the young of the goat and the cow ; — 

^what are these but ludicrous violators 
of the decencies of the universe ^ If there 
be beasts in Heaven "with eye down- 
dropt" upon the temperate and polar 

/_zones, they cannot lack diversion. It is, 
moreover, part of our plot to deny them 
immortality, and to attempt to interpose 
our jurisdiction, in such abstruse matters, 
between them and their Author, towards 
whom they yet bear an unshamed front. 
For man the animal is but a beggarly 
lump. He has never shown himself so 
provident as the ant, so ingenious as the 
beaver, so faithful as the dove, so forgiving 
as the hound. His senses are eternally 
below par ; his artistic faculties are be- 
fogged. The humblest thrush is an archi- 
tect and musician by eldest family tradition, 



THE CAPTIVES 211 

while it takes him a thousand years to 
conceive an ogee arch and a viol d' amore. 
And having driven from his pestilential 
company the whole retinue of dear es- 
quires, he began shamefacedly to reclaim 
them to his service. The horse came 
back, generously hiding his apprehensions ; 
the pig and the hen mechanically, at the 
prospect of free bed and board ; the dog 
with his glad conciliation, the cat with her 
aristocrat reserves. These abide with us, 
suffer through us, are persuasive and vol- 
uble, and endeavor to reconcile us with 
the great majority of wild livers, from 
whom we are divorced. In vain do they 
so press upon us our own lack of logic. 
We address them individually : " You, 
O immigrant, are personally pleasing unto 
me ; but your fellows, your blood-relations, 
your customs in your own country, — ach 
Himmel ! '' Our popular speech insults 
them at every turn : " as silly as a goose," 
" as vain as a peacock," " as ugly as a rat," 
" as obstinate as a mule," " as cross as a 
bear," " as dirty as a dog," " as sick as a 
dog," "to be hanged like a dog," "a dog's 
life," " Cur ! " " Puppy ! " Surely, no class 
of creatures, unless Jews in the twelfth cen- 



212 THE CAPTIVES 

tury, have ever undergone such ground- 
less contumely. Every word of Shylock's 
famous plea stands good for them, as also 
its close. "If you prick us, do we not 
bleed ? if you tickle us, do we not laugh ^ 
if you poison us, do we not die ? and, if 
you wrong us, shall we not revenge ? If 
we are like you in the rest, we will resem- 
ble you in that." When we hear of a 
writer who advises the practice of " cour- 
tesy " towards animals, and of a little girl 
who hoarded up wisdom from the speech 
of a turtle, our memories couple them as 
Alice- — and Sir Arthur Helps — in Won- 
derland. If it be in Utopia alone that 
murderous "sport" is impossible, and 
that only there it breeds rational pity when 
after a day's run, " a harmless and fearfull 
Hare should be devour' d by strong, fierce, 
and cruell Dogges," how far are we not 
from the time when modern conscien- 
tiousness shall make us just even to the 
exiles pent in a menagerie ? Our laws 
deal with these in a spirit of the most 
flagrant injustice. While every jury 
allows for reprisals, when dealing with 
human crime, no biped else, and no quad- 
ruped, with however blameless a record. 



THE CAPTIVES 213 

under whatever provocation, can be allowed 
an instant's hearing, when so much as sus- 
pected of a transgression. A leopard here 
at the Zoo revolts, perhaps for no specific 
cause. He is tired of being enslaved, and 
would resume sincerity. He offends ; he 
is executed, leaving ineradicable influences 
among the cages, as if their Danton had 
gone by, audible again : " ^e mon nom soit 
fletri ; que la France soit libre .' " Or the 
keeper abominably abuses a certain ele- 
phant, a very saint for patience, a genius 
for cleverness, a hero for humor ; and six 
years after, the same elephant, in another 
duchy, spies his old tormentor, winds his 
lithe proboscis about his waist, and neatly 
cracks him against a wall. A dozen in- 
fluential persons plead, as defence for the 
assassin, his unparalleled nobleness of 
character ; but the public blood is up : he 
has to die. To some reforms we shall 
never come, for thought about them is 
deadened in us by the operation of our 
accursed generic pride. Our codes ap- 
proximate too painfully to the largeness of 
the universal plan. We have, indeed, 
conceived of other suns, other systems, 
than ours ; but the hope is slight that 



214 THE CAPTIVES 

we can ever admit beasts, not to certain 
terms of equality with our own esteemed 
species, but even to the personal pronoun, 
and a place in the divine economy. 
Arrogance is bad for us, and bad for 
them. The very bliss of power is to 
protect and forbear ; could we learn it, we 
might, perhaps, inspire it in the shark, the 
jackal, and the butcher-bird. Meanwhile, 
in the maintenance of penal laws against 
our Ishmaels, it can at least be urged that, 
as yet, we know no better. As we are 
drowned in ignorance, it is inconceivable 
that we shall be hanged for sacrilege ! 
Could we analyze the impressions of un- 
cultivated persons, received from the cen- 
taurs in the Parthenon frieze, or the 
Sphinx of elder Egypt, we should prob- 
ably discover that these are looked upon 
as mere monsters : a compound of man 
and horse, or of woman and Honess, the 
conception of which is abhorrent and dis- 
tressing to the mind. (It is to be hoped 
that there are " stuck-up " horses and 
lionesses to adopt the corresponsive view). 
But the artists of the race, from the world's 
beginning, souls of a benign fancy, have 
gone on creating these mythic " monsters." 



THE CAPTIVES 215 

Long-eared fauns abound, and mermaids 
with silver and vermilion scales, and angels 
borne on vast white gull-like wings : dear 
non-anatomical shapes, for the most part, 
full of odd charm, and of a spiritual appli- 
cation which will last out until we are 
humble and humorous enough to read it. 
Nor, on second thought, can we fail to 
see gravest changes adumbrating the sub- 
ject. The Latin nations lag behind in 
conciliations, and England leads. There 
were not many, long ago, who passed the 
fraternal word to beasts : those who did 
so, Sidney, More, Vaughan, were the 
flower of their kind, and not without sus- 
picion of " queerness." Lord Erskine, 
less than three generations back, suffered 
great obloquy for his championship of 
what we are almost ready to concede as 
the "rights" of animals. Coleridge was 
well laughed at for saluting the ass's little 
foal as his brother. But Burns was not 
laughed at for his field-mouse, nor Blake 
for his fly. And there is no single char- 
acteristic of modern life so novel, so sig- 
nificant, as the yearning affectionateness 
with which our youngest poets allude to 
faunay and so adorn a moral. The habit 



2i6 THE CAPTIVES 

has grown with them, until every Pan's 
pipe breathes sweet pieties to the less 
articulate world. A line of Celia Thax- 
ter, addressed to a mussel on the stormy- 
Maine strand, has been their unconscious 
key-note. 

'* Thou thought of God ! . . . what more than 
thou am I ! " 

For Darwin has come and gone, and cut 
our boast from under us. 

On their own part, how benevolent are 
the estranged allies far away ! how ready 
to resume " the league of heart to heart " 
with some soul a little primal ! Any one, 
indeed, may tame a wild thing by no deeper 
necromancy than a succession of suppers 
and of kind words. Animals are disin- 
terested also, and ready to serve without 
rewards. Ravens are gentle marketers for 
Elijah ; the lions purr about the prophet 
Daniel ; the shyest fish swim into Tho- 
reau's hand ; S. Francis, in the tenderest 
of folk-tales, goes out to the hills, and 
reasons with the wicked wolf who sacks 
the Umbrian villages. He offers him free 
and ample maintenance, promises him im- 
munity from the hunters, and brings him 



THE CAPTIVES 217 

down among the women and children, to 
pledge himself to better behavior on his 
apologetic paw. S. Francis was not a 
very great fool : he was only Adam sane 
again, and interharmonized with the phy- 
sical universe. The majority of infants 
still show pleasure at the sight of a beetle, 
or a toad. Of course, their grasp kills it ; 
but that is not voluntary, as the pleasure 
is. The fatuous parents, however, are 
certain to change all that : toads, be it 
known, produce warts, and beetles sting. 
A lizard on a tree-trunk, a mink in the 
creek, a delicate gray squirrel on the stone 
wall, (charming persons exclusively mind- 
ing their own business,) are at all times 
providentially provided for our sweet little 
boys to kill. Strange that, whereas, by 
Tigris and Euphrates, we creatures had 
our communications with creatures in one 
kindly language, we should now roam over 
the face of the earth, everywhere accosting 
our demonstrable superiors with a gun ! 
Mr. Bryan, candidate for the Presidency 
of the United States, went into the forest, 
the other day, for rest and recreation, and 
had a stroke of luck : he shot something. 
It was a beautiful doe. We learn from 



21 8 THE CAPTIVES 

the newspapers that she had " stood look- 
ing at him, without any fear." Here is 
your typical high treason in these nice 
matters. Who will say but that the doe 
was about to give some sign ? (^a donne 
furieusement a penser. Blind bullies, sod- 
den usurpers that we are ! It is our dense 
policy to rebuff the touching advances 
of our old allies and kindred. Not 
Rhoecus only instinctively bruises the 
ambassador bee, and stifles the immortal 
message. 

If the Oriental religions have any mis- 
sion to discharge in our behalf, let them 
teach us speedily, through any gracious 
superstition whatsoever, their grave respect 
for animal life. When we are thoroughly 
converted, we shall not only cease to vivi- 
sect, but manumit our slaves of the ex- 
hibition-hall and the Zoo : we shall hear 
no longer from the lion-house the fell 
foreboding sound, as of Vercingetorix, 
Jugurtha, Zenobia, all together, imploring 
the gods for vengeance upon Rome. The 
captives have borne their fate, yet not quite 
dispassionately. They lose, behind bars, 
day by day, something of themselves hard 
to part with ; and they know it : but they 



THE CAPTIVES 219 

are no atheists. Outside is the hateful 
city, but the sun also, bringing strange 
fancies to them as it crosses the threshold. 
So much lies back of them, in that cell of 
humiliation, where they were not born ! 
What if there should be freedom again 
for them, beyond death ? Some thought 
as profound surges this morning in a vast 
antiphonal cry among the tanks and cages, 
and shakes, in passing, the soul of man. 

" O socii, neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum, 
O passi graviora ! dabit deus his quoque finem." 

1896. 



On Teaching One's Grandmother How 
to Suck Eggs 



ON TEACHING ONE'S GRAND- 
MOTHER HOW TO SUCK 
EGGS. 



IN the days of the Schoolmen, when no 
vexed question went without its fair 
showing, it seems incredible that the im- 
portant thesis hereto affixed as a title 
went a-begging among those hair-split- 
ting philosophers. Since Aristotle him- 
self overlooked it, Duns Scotus and the 
noted Paracelsus, Aureolus Philip Theo- 
phrastus Bombast de Hohenheim himself, 
were content to repeat his sin of omission. 
Even Sir Thomas Browne, "the horizon 
of whose understanding was much larger 
than the hemisphere of this world," 
neither unearthed the origin of this sin- 
gular implied practice, nor attempted in 
any way to uphold or depreciate it. The 
phrase hath scarce the grace of an Orien- 
tal precept, and scarce the dignity of 
Rome. It might sooner appertain to 



224 TEACHING GRANDMOTHER 

Sparta, where the old were held in rever- 
ence, and where their education, in a 
burst of filial anxiety, might be pro- 
longed beyond the usual term of mental 
receptivity. 

'. It is reserved therefore, for some 
modern inquirer to establish, whether the 
'strange accomplishment in mind was at 
any time, in any nation, barbarous or en- 
lightened, in universal repute among ven- 
erable females ; or else especially imparted, 
under the rose, as a sort of witch-trick, 
to conjurers, fortune-tellers, pythonesses, 
sibyls, and such secretive and oracular 
folk ; whether the initiatory lessons were 
theoretical merely ; and at what age the 
grandams (for the condition of hyper- 
maternity was at least imperative) were 
allowed to begin operations. 

It is a partial argument against the 
antiquity of the custom, and against the 
supposition of its having prevailed among 
old Europe's nomadic tribes, that several 
of these are accused by historians of 
having destroyed their progenitors so 
soon as the latter became idle and en- 
feebled : whereas it is reasonably to be 
inferred that the gentle process of ovi- 



HOW TO SUCK EGGS 225 

sugescence, had such then been invented, 
would have kept the savage fireside peopled 
with happy and industrious centenarians. 
After the arduous labor of their long 
lives, this new, leisurely, mild, and genteel 
trade could be acquired with impercepti- 
ble trouble. Cato mastering Greek at 
eighty, Dandolo leading hosts when past 
his October, are kittenish and irreverend 
figures beside that of a toothless Goth 
grandmother, learning, with melancholy 
energy, to suck eggs. 

We know not why the privilege of 
education, if granted to them without 
question, should have been withheld from 
their gray spouses, who certainly would 
have preferred so sociable an industry to 
whetting the knives of the hunters, or 
tending watch-fires by night. But no one 
of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking 
eggs. The gentle art was apparently 
sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld 
from the shaggy lords of creation, by 
whom the innutritious properties of the 
shell were happily unsuspected. 

By what means was the race of hens, 
for instance, preserved ? Statistics might 
be proffered concerning the ante-natal 
15 



226 TEACHING GRANDMOTHER 

consumption of fledglings, which would 
edify students of natural history. One 
bitterly-disputed point, the noble adage 
under consideration permanently settles ; 
a quibble which ought to have 

" staggered that stout Stagyrite," 

and which has come even to the notice 
of grave inductive theologians : vide- 
licet^ that the bird, and not the egg, may 
claim the priority of existence. For had 
it been otherwise, one's grandmother 
would been early acquainted with the 
very article which her posterity recom- 
mended to her as a novelty, and which, 
with respectful care, they taught her to 
utilize, after a fashion best adapted to her 
time of life. 

Fallen into desuetude is this judicious 
and salutary • custom. There must have 
been a time when a yellowish stain about 
the mouth denoted an age, a vocation, a 
limitation, effectually as did the bulla of 
the lad, the maiden's girdle, " the mar- 
shal's truncheon, or the judge's robe," or 
any of the picturesque distinctions now 
crushed out of the social code. But the 
orthodox sucking of eggs, the innocent. 



HOW TO SUCK EGGS 227 

austere, meditative pastime, is no more, 
and the glory of grandams is extinguished 
forever. 

The dreadful civility of our western 
woodsmen, the popular dissentient voice 
alike of the theatre and of the political 
meeting, — the casting of eggs wherefrom 
the element of youth is wholly eliminated, 
affords a speculation on heredity, and ap- 
pears to be a faint echo of some traditional 
squabble in the morning of the world, 
among disagreeing kinswomen ; the very 
primordial battle, where reloading was 
superfluous, where every shell told, whose 
blackest spite was spent in a golden rain 
and hail. What havoc over the face of 
young creation ; what coloring of pools, 
and of errant butterflies ! What distress 
amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose 
shady haunts trickled unwelcome mois- 
ture : a terror not unshared in the re- 
cesses of the coast : — 

** Intus aqua dukes y vivoque sedilia saxoy 
Nympharum domus.^'* 

One can fancy the younglings of the vast 
human family, the success of whose lesson 
to their elders was thus over-well demon- 
strated, marking the ebb and flow of hos- 



228 TEACHING GRANDMOTHER 

tilities, like the superb spirits of Richelieu 
and the fourteenth Louis, eyeing the 
great Revolution. What marvel, if, 
struck with remorse at the senile strife 
of the " she-citizens," they vowed never, 
never to teach another grandmother to 
suck eggs ! So it was, maybe, that the 
abused custom was lost from the earth. 

Nay, more ; its remembrance is per- 
verted into a taunt more scorching than 
lightning, more silencing than the bolt of 
Jove. Sus Minervam is Cicero's elegant 
equivalent ; and Partridge says to Tom 
Jones, quoting his old schoolmaster : 
" Polly Matete cry town is my daska- 
lon " : the English whereof runneth : 
Teach your grandmother how to suck 
eggs ! Is not the phrase the cream of 
scorn, the catchword of insubordination, 
the blazing defiance of tongues unbroken 
as a one-year's colt ? It grated strangely 
on our ear. We grieved over the trans- 
formation of a favorite saw, innocuous 
once, and conveying a meek educational 
suggestion. We came to admit that the 
Academe where the old sat at the feet of 
their descendants, to be ingratiated into 
the most amiable of professions, was 



HOW TO SUCK EGGS 229 

nothing better, in memory, than an im- 
pertinence. And we sadly avowed, in 
the underground chamber of our private 
heart, that, as for worldly prospects, it 
would be fairly suicidal, all things con- 
sidered, to aspire now to the chair of 
that professorship. 

Let some reformer, who cherishes his 
ancestress, and who is not averse to break 
his fast on an omelet, dissuade either 
object of his regard from longer lending 
name and countenance to a vulgar sneer 
Shall such be thy mission, reader ? We 
would wish the extended acquaintance 
with that mysterious small cosmos which 
suggests to the liberal palate broiled wing 
and giblets in posse ; and joy for many 
a year of thy parent's parent, who is in 
some sort thy reference and means of 
identification, the hub of thy far-reaching 
and more active life ; but, prithee, wrench 
apart their sorry association in our Eng- 
lish speech. Purists shall forgive thee 
if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile in thy 
sleeve at the fantastic text which brought 
them together. 

1885. 



Wilful Sadness in Literature 



WILFUL SADNESS IN LIT- 
ERATURE. 



*' Leave things so prostitute. 
And take the Alcaic lute! '* 

Ben Jonson. 

MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, in 
the preface to the first edition of 
his collected poems (1853) withdrew from 
circulation, and gave reasons for with- 
drawing, his splendid Empedocles on Etna, 
Nothing in Mr. Arnold's career did him 
more honor than that fine scrupulousness 
leading him to decry his dramatic mas- 
terpiece as too mournful, too introspec- 
tive, too unfruitful of the cheer and courage 
which it is the business of poets to give 
to the world. He says of it, that it be- 
longs to a class of faulty representations 
" in which suffering finds no vent in 
action ; in which a continuous state of 
mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved 



234 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 

by incident, hope, or resistance ; in which 
there is everything to be endured, noth- 
ing to be done. In such situations there 
is inevitably something morbid, in the 
description of them something monoto- 
nous. When they occur in actual life, 
they are painful, not tragic : the repre- 
sentation of them in poetry is painful 
also." The same verdict that con- 
demns the stagnant sadness of Empedo- 
cleSy reacts upon Clough's Dipsychus^ to 
some of us the most attractive of modern 
monodies, on Marlowe's Faustus^ and on 
Hamlet itself. But every one of these is 
an inestimable experience to the happy 
and the virtuous who love the intimate 
study of humanity, and are made, by 
the perusal, more thoughtful and tender. 
On none but general considerations, could 
Mr. Arnold have attempted to suppress 
Empedocles, The great rules of aesthetics, 
as for ethics, must be for the many, not 
for the few ; and the many are neither 
happy nor virtuous : and it may well seem 
a sort of treachery in a man of genius to 
speak aloud at all, in our vast society of 
the desponding and the unspiritual, un- 
less he can speak the helping word. This 



SADNESS IN LITERATURE 235 

cannot be sufficiently insisted upon before 
young writers, who are too ready to burst 
in upon us with their Ahs and Wella- 
days, and to set up, at twenty, for jaded 
cynics, and lovers who have loved, accord- 
ing to their own pinched measure, too 
well. Some public censor, a Stoic hav- 
ing a heart, and perfect control of it, 
should be appointed, in every township, 
to kill off whatever is uselessly doleful, 
in the egg, and spread abroad the right 
idea of what is fit to be uttered in this 
valley of tears. The elect should be 
supplied with Empedocleian extras : but 
the multitude which can be impressed by 
their intrinsic evil should never be incited 
to approach their extrinsic beauty. 

The play which leaves us miserable 
and bewildered, the harrowing social les- 
son leading nowhere, the transcript from 
commonplace life in which nothing is ad- 
mirable but the faithful skill of the au- 
thor, — these are bad morals because they 
are bad art. With them ranks the in- 
vertebrate poetry of two and three gene- 
rations ago, which has bequeathed its 
sickly taint to its successor in popular 
favor, our modern minor fiction. Au- 



236 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 

thors are, in a sense, the universal bur- 
den-bearers : those who can carry much 
vicariously, without posing or complain- 
ing. Mr. Arnold's penance for his mel- 
ancholy is a noble spectacle ; and it will 
always do what he feared Empedocles 
would fail to do, " inspirit and rejoice the 
reader." The ancients stepped securely 
in this matter of sadness ; for piety, re- 
tribution, awe, spring from every agony 
of QEdipus and Orestes. Many of the 
Elizabethan dramas are dark and terrible ; 
but they compel men to think, and teach 
more humanities than a university course. 
Mr. Meredith's influence, in our own day, 
is not such as will induce you to sit shak- 
ing your maudlin head over yourself and 
all creation ; neither — need it be added ? 
— is Mr. Stevenson's. Mr. Henry James 
has just said of Mr. Lowell : " He is an 
erect fighting figure on the side of opti- 
mism and beauty." What made Brown- 
ing exceedingly popular at last, was his 
courage in overthrowing blue devils. 

" What had I on earth to do 
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ? ' ' 

His many and unique merits have small 
share in the result. 



SADNESS IN LITERATURE 



'37 



Now, wilful sadness, as Plato thinks, 
as the School-men heartily thought after 
him, is nothing less than an actual crime. 
Sadness which is impersonal, reluctantly 
uttered, and adjusted, in the utterance, to 
the eternal laws, is not so. It is well to 
conceal the merely painful, as did the 
Greek audiences and the masters of their 
drama. That critic would be crazy, or 
excessively sybaritic, who would bar out 
the tragic from the stage, the studio, the 
orchestra, or the library shelf. Melan- 
choly, indeed, is inseparable from the 
highest art. We cannot wish it away ; 
but we can demand a mastery over it in 
the least, as well as in the greatest : a mel- 
ancholy like that of Burns, truth itself, 
native dignity itself; or the Virgilian mel- 
ancholy of Tennyson in his sweet brood- 
ings over the abysses of our unblest life, 
and the turn of his not hopeless thought 
and phrase. We can demand, in these 
matters, the insincerity of the too-little, 
rather than the cant of the too-much. 
The danger of expressing despondency is 
extreme. The maudlin shoots like a para- 
site from the most moving themes, and 
laughter dogs us in our rapt mood. It 



238 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 

was not without reason that Thackeray- 
made fun of Werther. What Sidney 
sweetly calls — 

" Poore Petrarch's long-deceased woes," 

Stirred up the scepticism of one Leigh 
Hunt, and of the indelicate public after 
him. No poet can put fully into words 
the ache and stress of human passion : no 
very wise poet will ever try to do so, save 
by the means of reserves, elisions, evasions. 
The pathos which goes deep is generally a 
plain statement, not a reflection. The 
old ballad, Waly^ Waly, for instance, is a 
terrible thing to get away from, dry-eyed. 
Nothing is so poignant, at times, in poetry, 
as a mere obituary announcement. Hear 
the long throbbing lines of the old elegy 
supposed to be by Fulke Greville, Lord 
Brooke : 

" Learning her light hath lost. Valor hath slain her 

knight : 
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's 

delight." 

Or Chapman : 

'* For now no more of Uncus' race survived : they 

all were gone. 
No more his royal self did live ; no more his noble son. 
The golden Meleager now : their glasses all were run." 



SADNESS IN LITERATURE 239 

The heart-breaking climax of Lear, the 
bursting-point of so much grandeur and so 
much suffering, is a dying commonplace 
almost grotesque : " Pray you, undo this 
button." But to harrow us is another 
affair altogether. Plato could never for- 
give a subject not inevitable, chosen simply 
because it is in itself piteous or startling, 
and invites the rhetorical gabble which its 
creator, after one fashion or another, can 
spend upon it. 

The French and their followers have 
driven us into a demand for decency, and 
unmuzzled pessimism is no more decent 
than the things oftener named and con- 
tested by our worthiest critics. What use 
have we for any Muse, be she the most 
accomplished in the world, who lives but 
to be, in a charming phrase of Southey's, 
" soothed with delicious sorrow '* ? Art 
has little to do with her : for art is made 
of seemly abstinences. The moment it 
speaks out fully, lets us know all, ceases 
to represent a choice and a control of its 
own material, ceases to be, in short, an 
authority and a mystery, and prefers to 
set up for a mere Chinese copy of life, — 
just so soon its birthright is transferred. 



240 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 

" I answer paradoxically, but truly, I think 
truly,'* that even Beauty has her respon- 
sibilities, and Art her ideals of conduct. 
Nay, she has her definite dogma. " Our 
only chance," says Addington Symonds in 
a private letter to Robert Louis Steven- 
son, " seems to me to maintain, against all 
appearances, that evil can never, and in no 
way, be victorious." 

We owe our gratitude to the men of 
letters who deliberately undertake to be 
gay : for nobody expects unconscious and 
spontaneous gayety in books nowadays. 
The modern spirit has seen to that. No 
thanks of ours are too good even for the 
bold bad Mr. Henley, who is so acrid 
towards Americans : for he is the one 
living poet already famous, who has struck, 
and means to strike, the very note of 
" How happy is he born and taught," 
and " Shall I, wasting in despair." But 
if our dilettantes lament a withered wild- 
flower, or praise a young face, they feel 
that they have done enough towards clear- 
ing the air, and justifying " the ways of 
God to man." It is inconvenient to have 
the large old fundamental feelings : to be 
energetic, or scornful, or believing. The 



SADNESS IN LITERATURE 241 

fashionable poetic utterance is dejected, 
and of consummate refinement; le besoin 
de sentir is about it like a strange fragrance. 
We have had disheartening modern music, 
and of the highest order, too long. 
Beginning with Byron, and, in a far differ- 
ent manner, with Shelley, we may count 
those problems of our life few indeed 
which have lacked the poor solution of a 
protest or a tear. Wordsworth was the 
last great man 

— " contented if he might enjoy 
The things that others understand.'* ' 

Yet Wordsworth counts for little in this 
case, since he had no marked constitu- 
tional sensitiveness. The lyres of " Par- 
naso mount " have grown passive and 
unpartisan. They have ceased to rouse 
us, and we have ceased to wonder at them 
because of it. To sigh, to scowl, to 
whimper, is the ambition of minstrels in 
the magazines ; of the three, whimpering 
is the favorite. Now, to " make a scene " 
is not mannerly, even on paper. Before 
the implacable Fates we may as well be 
collected. It seems less than edifying to 
ask the cold one, though in enchanting 
16 



242 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 

numbers, whether her bosom be of marble, 
or of her ghost whether it will not visit 
us in the garden. Yet such attitudinizing 
pathos, impossible so long as faith was 
general, and true emotion therefore unex- 
hausted, the pathos of the decadence, the 
exaggeration of normal moods and affec- 
tation of more than is felt, V expression 
forte des sentiments faihles^ — is the prevail- 
ing feature of current verse. Rather, to 
be quite accurate, it was the prevailing 
feature a moment ago. There are, in the 
east, other portents more significant. It 
is indicative not only of his middle age, 
but of something touching ourselves and 
our to-morrow, that Mr. Swinburne, let 
us say, is less stormy and maledictionary, 
and longs not so incessantly to be laid in 
the exquisite burial-places of his imagina- 
tion. They that wail well in duodecimo 
may presently be accused of giddiness and 
shallow thought. For literature, at last, 
is picking up heart : health and spring and 
fight are re-establishing themselves. Out 
of the alcoves of time, certain sunny faces 
of old look fatherly and smiling, as the 
vapors disperse. Hail also, young meek 
out-riders, morning-colored contempora- 



SADNESS IN LITERATURE 



243 



ries ! At least, you are of excellent cheer. 
You have done with sourness, and 

— '* hear it sweep 
In distance down the dark and savage vale.'* 

Change is at hand. The Maypole is up 
in Bookland. 



An Inquirendo into the Wit and Other 

Good Parts of His Late Majesty, 

KING CHARLES THE 

SECOND 



AN INQUIRENDO INTO THE 

WIT AND OTHER GOOD 

PARTS OF HIS LATE 

MAJESTY, KING 

CHARLES THE 

SECOND 



Scene : Saint James's Park, on the after- 
noon of the twenty-ninth of May. 
Edward Clay, with a twig of oak stuck 
in his hat is on the bank of the Httle 
lake, feeding the water-fowl. Percy 
Wetherell, a fellow-author, and Rhoda, 
his wife, who are crossing the bridge, 
perceive him. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

See ! there's our dear Mr. Clay. What 
is he doing that for ? 

WETHERELL 

The motive must be pure benevolence. 
Give me a little start, and I will run him 
down. \Followed by Rhoda^ he goes down 



248 AN INgUIRENDO 

the steps^ close to his friend' s shoulder ^ ob- 
serves the decoration^ and utters in a sepul- 
chral tone : " Long live Oliver ! " Clay 
looks up^ and smiles^ still breaking his biscuit. 
Finally he speaks ;] 

CLAY 

You have guessed it : I am keeping 
Restoration Day. It struck me as a 
pleasing rite to come up here and feast the 
descendants of King Charles the Second's 
water-fowl. I have to lecture on him 
to-night. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

King Charles the Second ! Why, Mr. 
Clay, I thought he was the dreadfullest 
person ! 

WETHERELL 

Easy now, my only love : don't hurt 
Edward's little feelings. He is a notor- 
ious Carolian specialist, a quasi-Cavalier, 
a pre-Jacobite, a seventeenth-centurion, 
and all that. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Oh ! a Royalist, a White Rose man ? 
I never dreamed it. 

CLAY 

Nothing so concrete, Mrs. Wetherell. 
Only, you see, I honestly like the rogue ; 



AN TNQUIRENDO 249 

people don't understand him. If I had 
your husband's leisure, I should never 
rest until I had moused in the archives at 
first hand, and said the authentic last good 
word for him. There would be no end of 
fun in it, and fun and justice are a fine 
pair. 

WETHERELL 

That green bird on your boot will 
choke himself It is wonderful how 
tame they are ! — I thought you knew 
more than anybody alive, on that subject, 
these ten years. 

CLAY 

I might say with Margaret, Duchess of 
Newcastle : " I have thought more than I 
have read, and read more than I have 
written.'* 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Do you really mean to make people 
like him ? They taught us in the school- 
books that he was a bad good-for-nothing 
king. 

WETHERELL 

Perhaps, as Mark Twain might allege, 
he did not choose to consider himself as 
being in " the king business." He was 
a choice wag, at any rate. 



250 AN INQUIRENDO 

CLAY 

Yes : though not much worse than you. 
And he was the last Mind we have seen, 
or shall ever see, on the throne. 

WETHERELL 

Owch ! Treason ! She is all she should 
be, God bless her. 

CLAY 

[^Laughing.'] Allowed. I was contending 
that Charles the Second had wit, and a 
keen survey of men and things : he had 
the literary-philosophic turn, in short. 
He was n't good, he was n't beautiful, he 
was n't much of a Protestant, or a Consti- 
tutional Sovereign ; but it is my long- 
standing theory that he was an indolent 
original genius of the first water, and a fine 
character spoiled. Here, billy, quack, 
quack, quack ! 

WETHERELL 

Your indolent original point of view ! 
I don't deny we have some pretty valu- 
able bequests from that bacchanalian reign : 
the Habeas Corpus Act, for instance. But 
Charles himself! Who is a neater Pocket 
Compendium of all the vices ? How are 
you going to excuse him ? Because he 
was weak ? 



AN INQUIRENDO 251 

CLAY 

Why do you think he must be excused ? 
My pious intention is only to extra-illus- 
trate him : " naught extenuate, and naught 
set down in malice." I mean to provide 
the ordinary listener at the Institute with a 
little dispassionate extra acquaintanceship, 
pleasant in its nature, with the gentleman 
in question ; and I distinctly mean not to 
tamper with what knowledge of him he may 
have acquired on other themes, and from 
other sources. You see how sly a plan 
of campaign it is. But your adjective, 
Wetherell, will never do. Weak ? Where 
did you hear that fiddle-faddle ? He had 
the most tremendous will. Repeatedly, 
and with the greatest severity and de- 
spatch, he took matters over into his own 
hands ; and very often he was right, and 
ahead of contemporary policy. Look at 
the way he prorogued Parliament, in the 
May of 1679, ^fter the famous quarrel 
over the trial of the five lords ; the way 
he rejected the application of the Roos 
divorce bill, shaped so as to give himself 
latitude and precedent; his speech in the 
Upper House, insisting on holding to the 
terms of pardon which he had offered 



252 AN INQUIRENDO 

from Breda ; his letters to the young Duke 
of Gloucester, when there was rumor of a 
change of religion ; or, to come to smaller 
and uglier matters, look at his obstinate 
maintenance of his right to appoint the 
ladies of the Queen's bedchamber, his 
whole inexcusable treatment of the great 
Chancellor. Weak! Haven't you read 
Green ? Green, who comes down hard 
on him, would sooner have you think him 
an accomplished tyrant, and so should I. 

WETHERELL 

Ungrateful, then. He was ungrateful 
to the very people who brought about 
the Restoration, was n't he ? — Rhoda, 
these swans are actually fatter than Lord 
Whidbourne's. (Do you like to hear Clay 
talk ? I am egging him on ; it does me 
good.) 

MRS. WETHERELL 

I shall ask him to dinner, Percy, to 
atone for you. Yes: it is great to find so 
much animation expended on dead issues. 

CLAY 

Never wilfully ungrateful, that I can 
see. Think of the times, think of the hue 
and cry after indemnities and offices ; 
think of the million million services, little 



AN INQUIRENDO 253 

and great, reported, invented, exaggerated, 
and real, all being urged together, on the 
day when fortune first smiled on the King. 
Could any one man satisfy such greed ? 
Might not any one man get confused in 
such a muddle of beseeching hungry 
hands, and despair of ever dealing justly, 
save with the few he knew and remem- 
bered ? And those he never forgot : not 
the least Penderell among them. 

WETHERELL 

How about the epigram, — Barrow's, 
was n't it ? A very good hit : let me see. 
Te magis, that 's it : 

Te magis optavit rediturum, Carole, nemo : 
Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus. 

CLAY 

That is just the sort of dig Charles 
enjoyed. It is n't malicious. He was 
immensely amused by the protestations 
of the realm which, according to its own 
tale, had prayed for him, longed for him, 
and labored to bring him to his own again. 
He said ironically : " The fault is plainly 
mine that I came not before." How did 
he keep his patience through the incessant 
begging ? He must have suffered more 
than a newly-elected president in America. 



254 AN INQUIRENDO 

As it was, he granted innumerable pardons, 
and restitutions, and awards, " hearing 
anybody against anybody," and sure to be 
of propitious bent when petitions forced 
their way into his own hand. But he 
kept no memoranda. Or, as his apologist, 
Roger North, put it in capital plain Saxon, 
" he never would break his Head with 
Business." Long before there was much 
chance of his securing his succession to 
the crown, the hints of his adherents fell 
about him as thick as snow-flakes. Has n't 
he told us how the country innkeeper, 
alone with him a moment, during his 
fugitive days, read him through his dis- 
guise ? " He kissed my hand that was 
upon the back of the chair, and said to 
me : ' God bless you wherever you go, for 
I do not doubt, before I die, to be a lord, 
and my wife a lady.' So I laughed and 
went away. ... He proved very honest." 
That same innkeeper must have turned 
up, two hundred strong at least, at White- 
hall. Again, you know how poor the 
King was, and how estates and emoluments 
had been parcelled out, and tied up, dur- 
ing the Protectorate. He had actually 
nothing, at first, to give. 



AN INQUIRENDO 255 

WETHERELL 

Except scandal. 

CLAY 

Irrelevant ! 

WETHERELL 

And, of course, the immortal house- 
warming : a gift to the imaginations of all 
Englishmen forever. I am sorry I was n't 
there myself. 

CLAY 

O that day ! What a wonderful pro- 
cession it must have been, from London 
Bridge to Whitehall, through what Evelyn, 
in his Diary, so beautifully calls " a lane of 
happy faces," and troops pressing to their 
hps the hilts of their weapons, and waving 
them overhead, in a unique salutation ; the 
King, whom the Speaker of the House of 
Commons was about to address as King of 
Hearts, riding, on his thirtieth birthday, 
between his brothers of York and Glou- 
cester, past the long waving of scarfs and 
glitter of rapiers, bowing to left and right, 
like a dark pine in the wind ; the saddle- 
cloths of purple and gold, the salvos, the 
tears, " the ways strewn all with flowers, 
bells ringing, steeples hung with tapestries, 
fountains running with wine, trumpets. 



2 56 AN INQUIRENDO 

music, and myriads of people flocking ; 
and two hundred thousand horse and foot 
brandishing their swords, and shouting 
with inexpressible joy." 

WETHERELL 

Yes; joy with a bill of expenses. Eng- 
land clamored against the Judges, and for 
the King ; and, like Saul, he came : tall, 
robust, keen, suave, comely, with the 
curse of retrogression behind him. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Hear the magnificent phrases ! 

CLAY 

But they are true. 

WETHERELL 

Our collaborated Prose Works, speci- 
men sheets. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

And to think you are all out of 

practice ! 

WETHERELL 

Of what, shepherdess ? Of truth ? 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Mr. Clay, have n't you some more nice 
Charles-Secondy things to tell me ? I am 
so interested. 

WETHERELL 

More of your ingenious charities. Clay, 



AN INQUIRENDO 257 

by all means. Those faithless ducks of 
yours are seceding to the children, and 
Rhoda and I are out for a walk. Come, 
let us sink to the occasion. We might 
pace up and down awhile, under the trees 
beyond, at the edge of the old tilt-yard. 
Then let us all go together to the Abbey. 
We have promised to meet two Ameri- 
can relatives of Rhoda's, at half after 
three. They wrote us that they arrived 
only yesterday ; but your homing pigeon 
of a Yankee always must make straight 
for the Abbey. Meanwhile, can't you 
give us a sort of rehearsal of that lecture ^ 

MRS. WETHERELL 

He will, he will ! 

CLAY 

I have n't all my notes with me. You 
are sure it won't tire you ? 

WETHERELL 

Never. I love the aesthetic point of 
view. If any man remind me now that 
my father was a Whig, I will bray at 
him. 

CLAY 

Well, well, nice of you, I 'm sure. You 
know my idea is just to present a special 
plea. How will you have me begin ? I 

17 



258 AN INQUIRENDO 

can't go on automatically, as if you were 
the Public Eye. 

WETHERELL 

Oh, anecdotes : or his witticisms. 
There must be scores of them running 
wild. Leave out the done-to-death ones. 
Cut me no sirloin, sirrah ; starve me no 
NelHes. 

CLAY 

I believe "Sir Loin" to be spurious. It 
belongs with ever so many Charles Lamb 
puns, sayable enough, only not said by 
the sayer. 

WETHERELL 

There is n't much chance for a king 
who has a genius for concise conversation. 

CLAY 

No. He does n't get reported correctly, 
for one thing. How could Sir Walter, 
weighted as he was, as writers of his time 
were, by the heavy-artillery ideas of dic- 
tion, reproduce, in Peveril or Woodstock^ 
this light super-civilized fashion of speech, 
supple and stinging as a whip ? And no 
writer of fiction since, has quite captured 
it, except Mr. Marriott Watson. You 
remember that episode in Galloping 'Dick ? 
Exquisite ! Charles the Second's talk is 



AN INQUIRENDO 259 

altogether the most admirable thing about 
him : though courtly, it had none of the 
circumlocutions of courtliness ; it was ex- 
clusive and pertinent. " All this," as 
Walton sweetly says of Donne, " with a 
most particular grace, and an inexpressible 
addition of comeliness." The King's only 
long story, which for years he was always 
ready to tell from the beginning, " ever 
embellished," says mischievous Bucking- 
ham, "with some new circumstance," and 
which was wont to gather a knot of lis- 
teners old and new, was the story of his 
adventures after the battle of Worcester, 
in 1650. No heartier romance exists of 
pluck and patience, save the later record, 
so like it, of Prince Charlie's hardships, 
and his heroism under them ; and its 
author's attachment to his only novel is 
simply a connoisseurship, a piece of 
esoteric appreciation : he took and gave 
delight with such thrilling biographical 
details as might have come from the 
mouth of Odysseus himself His short 
sayings are all sterling, and his nicknames 
stuck like burs. Mr. Henry Bennet, after- 
wards Earl of Arlington, the grave and 
too inductive gentleman who so moved 



26o AN INQUIRENDO 

the mirth of Miss Frances Stuart, was 
" Whereas " to his royal master ; the 
yacht named after the stout Duchess of 
Portsmouth, the yacht to whose great 
sheets the King and the Duke of York 
sprang " like common seamen," in a ter- 
rible storm once, off the Kentish coast, 
was known far and wide as " The Fubbs." 
Another joke about " Hans in Keldar,'* 
patronizing the ice-fair on the Thames, 
and inscribing his name there among the 
visitors, one need not recall too circum- 
stantially. The Queen Dowager, Henri- 
etta Maria, was always " Mam,'' to her 
perfectly respectful and solicitous eldest 
son ; in an alliteration like an early Eng- 
lish poet's, he congratulated his sister on 
her recovery from a grave illness, " be- 
tween Mam's Masses, and M. de May- 
erne's pills." His little portraitures of 
people, his given reason for a human like 
or dislike, his insight into character, and 
his gently sarcastic turn of phrase in ex- 
pressing it, — are they not all superior 
things of their kind ? He felt it impos- 
sible to marry a princess out of Germany : 
she would be " so dull and foggy." Of 
Isaac Vossius, the imperfect sceptic. 



AN INQUIRENDO 261 

Charles said : " Voss refuses to belie v^e 
nothing, save the Bible." A celebrated 
man of affairs, then a deft page at court, 
won this neat encomium : " Sidney Godol- 
phin is never in the way, and never out 
of the way." Sedley, shining Sedley, 
whom Charles greatly liked, he dubbed 
" Apollo's viceroy." His " Save the Earl 
of Burford ! " when riding under the win- 
dow whence Mistress Eleanor Gwynne 
ironically offered to throw her small son, 
since she had no name to call him by, is 
like the very finest coup de theatre^ and too 
like him not to be true. This climate he 
rated as the best climate, " because it gives 
the greatest number of out-of-door days." 
Not so thought Charles of Orleans, long 
before him, arraigning English weather 
from the standpoint of its unwilling guest, 
as at all times " prejudicial to the human 
frame." And every one knows the inimi- 
table apology of Charles to his watchers, 
for " being so unconscionably long a- 
dying." 

Unlike most wits, he preferred dialogue 
to monologue. His gravity and authority 
were so fixed, his merriment so obviously 
local and temporal, that repartee was part 



262 AN INQUIRENDO 

of his game ; he winced at nothing, and 
often accepted, with excellent grace, sharper 
thrusts than his own. It is sometimes 
repeated that he was angered by Roches- 
ter's incomparable epigram, pinned to his 
chamber door : 

*' Here lies our sovereign lord the King, 
Whose word no man relies on; 
Who never said a foolish thing. 
Nor ever did a wise one." 

But we have on record his amusing and 
sufficient footnote, that his sayings were 
his own, and his doings were his min- 
isters'. (This answer, by the way, must 
have been made to fit the occasion^ and 
the gay exigency of it, for he was exceed- 
ingly jealous of his unused prerogative. 
" I assure you," he writes to one of his 
family, about 1668, "that my lord of 
Buckingham does not govern affairs 
here." And Clarendon attests later, that 
" he abhorred to be thought to be gov- 
erned by any single person.") At White- 
hall, as the gentlemen-in-waiting laid the 
plates before the King, they bent a knee. 
"You see how they serve me," Charles 
said pleasantly to his guest, the Chevalier 



AN INQUIRENDO 263 

de Grammont. " I thank your Majesty 
for the explanation," that accomplished 
wag replied, "for I thought they were 
begging your Majesty's pardon for so 
bad a dinner." No reply at all, were it 
but pungent, offended him. " Shaftes- 
bury, Shaftesbury, I do believe thou art 
the wickedest fellow in my dominions ! " 
" Of a subject. Sire, mayhap I am." 
" Killigrew, whither goest thou, booted 
and spurred ? " " To Hell, to fetch up 
Oliver to look after the welfare of the 
English." As a monitor, this same lewd, 
lying, scribbling, kindly, music-loving 
Killigrew was almost as successful with 
Charles as was Nell Gwynne. For sharp 
sensible comment went home to him ; he 
saw a point none the less because it told 
against him. " Such ability and under- 
standing has Charles Stuart," growled the 
man who was called his jester, " that I do 
long to see him employed as King of 
England." Libels and satires had small 
sting for him. Mistress Holford, a young 
lady of the court, seated in her own 
apartment, warbles Old Rowley, the ballad 
of close but inelegant libel, at the top 
of her silvery voice. A rap comes at 



264 AN INQUIRENDO 

the outer door, from one strolling by. 
" Who 's there ? '* she asks, with uncon- 
cern. " Old Rowley himself, Madam ! " 
m the " plump bass " of Carolus Se- 
cundus. Nothing much more diverting 
ever happened to him than the inverted 
salute of a worthy citizen, who once ran 
along in the street, beside his coach, with 
a half-formed fervent " God bless your 
Majesty ! " upon his lips : the spaniel 
pup on his Majesty's knee, suddenly 
reaching out, gave the man a nip, and 
caused the ready benison to blurt forth in- 
continently as " God bl — amn your dogs ! " 
The well-worn tradition of Master Busby 
of Westminster School reversing condi- 
tions with the King, is characteristic on 
both sides : Charles all humor and tol- 
eration, the little man stiffened with 
conscious reputation, to be upheld at all 
costs, and heroically wearing his cap be- 
fore the face of visiting royalty, " lest the 
boys should think there lived a greater 
than myself" And was it not a prettier 
pass yet, between the monarch and his im- 
pregnable Quaker who wanted a charter ? 
Penn came to his first audience with his 
hat, on the principle of unconvention and 



AN INQUIRENDO 265 

equality, firmly fixed upon his brows. 
Presently the King, having moved apart 
from the attendants, in his gleaming dress, 
slowly and ceremoniously bared his head. 
Penn interrupted his own plea. " Friend 
Charles, why hast taken off thy hat ? " 
" Because it has so long been the custom 
here," said the other, with that peculiar 
lenient smile of his, " for but one person 
to remain covered at a time." (It strikes 
one that a Httle of this humor would have 
saved his father from much woe on a not 
dissimilar occasion in the Commons ; and, 
indeed, throughout.) Equally charming 
was his behavior, on being laid hold of, 
by the hiccoughing Lord Mayor, — Vy- 
ner, was n't that his name ? — who insisted 
that he should come back and " finish 
t' other bottle." Charles, instead of 
glowering, hummed a line of an old song, 
a synopsis of the difficult situation to the 
company, which none other but he could 
have given with any grace : 

'' The man that is Drunke is as good as a King ! " 

and sat again. He never became, as his 
tutor, the loyal Duke of Newcastle, feared, 
"seared with majestic." 



266 AN INQUIRENDO 

The Lord's Anointed liked to forego 
his authority, and come as a mere specta- 
tor into a session of Parliament. " ' Tis as 
good as a play/' the provoking creature 
said. He would get down from his throne 
in the Lords, to stand with folded arms 
by the hearth, drawing a group around 
him, and breaking up the order and im- 
pressiveness of the place. Those really 
interested in statecraft, whose fond incuba- 
tions he so overturned, must have found 
him an enfant terrible to an incorrigible 
degree. A memorandum-book, to be 
seen in one of the cases at the Bodleian, 
lies open at a bit of scribbled correspond- 
ence between himself and his Chancellor, 
passed from one to the other in the mid- 
dle of debate. The King's share is as 
wayward and roguish as Sterne could have 
made it. 

— " I would willingly make a visite to 
my sister at tunbridge, for a night or two 
at farthest. When do you thinke I can 
best spare that time ? " 

— "I know no reason why you may 
not, for such a tyme (two nights) go the 
next weeke about Wednsday or Thursday, 
and return tyme enough for the adiourne- 



AN INQUIRENDO 267 

mentj which you ought to do the weeke 
following. I suppose you will goe with 
a light Trayne." 

— "I intend to take nothing but my 
night-bag." 

— " God, you will not go without forty 
or fifty horses ? " 

— "I counte that part of my night- 
bag." 

The young fugitive at Boscobel, a more 
willing Alfred, insisted on preparing sup- 
per, and produced "Scots collops," with 
Colonel Careless for under-cook. His 
minute solicitude for others, at this time 
and after, in the stress of his own troubles, 
left indelible impress on many hearts. 
He was at his bravest on the open road, 
and in the secret manor and the oak 
tree : the odd situations became him as 
if he were King of the Romany. For 
ceremony and trammels of all kinds he 
had a thorough disrelish, and passed his 
time but resignedly amid " the pomp 
of music and a host of bowing heads." 
Cosmo III., Grand Duke of Tuscany, 
relates, in his book of travels, that at 
a state banquet at Whitehall, the host 
privily requested that his chair be re- 



268 AN INQUIRENDO 

moved and changed, because it was con- 
spicuously the most comfortable in the 
room. Could informality farther go ? But 
Charles maintained his gay grace and easy 
simplicity deliberately, and in conjunction 
with decisive dignity. With mere stand- 
offishness he had nothing to do. Sir 
Walter Besant tells us in his London : 
" The palace was accessible to all ; the 
guard stood at the gate, but everybody 
was admitted, as to a town ; the King 
moved freely about the courts, in the mall, 
in the parks, sometimes unattended. The 
people drove their packhorses or their wag- 
gons up and down the road, and hardly 
noticed the swarthy-faced man who stood 
under the shade of a tree, watching the 
players along the mall. This easy and 
fearless familiarity vanished with the 
Stuarts." Whosoever wished it, might 
see his sovereign dance the brantle, per- 
haps with the young delicate-footed Italian 
Duchess, his brother's wife ; or hear him 
tell over the " grouse-in-the-gunroom " 
stories of his Scotch captivity. Here at 
home he went his way, with a nod, a 
smile, and a word for all : " a far more 
successful kingcraft," says Macaulay, 



AN INQUIRENDO 269 

" than any his father or grandfather had 
practised/' In the beginning, Charles had 
a beggarly income, and whimsically com- 
plained of it. " What troubles me most, 
is to see so many of you come to me to 
Whitehall, and to think that you must go 
somewhere else to seek your dinner ! " 
He was hostile only to " fuss and feath- 
ers,'* the dry husk of social laws. He 
had his father's instinct for what was beau- 
tiful and imposing. At his coronation, 
he revived for the last time, and with its 
most august splendors, the ancient cus- 
tom of procession from the Tower to the 
Abbey : a personal revelation, moreover, 
of that generous kindness towards the 
common people, which made them adore 
him. He also endeavored, though in 
vain, to re-establish the masque, the most 
charming form of court entertainment, in- 
tertwined with all manner of old fragrant 
poetic associations. At his coming, he 
found the Maypoles down, the shows 
over, races, dances, and merry-hearted 
sports cut short ; the theatres were dis- 
mantled, and the sole appreciation that 
actors got, or hoped for, was at the whip- 
ping-post. His first thought was for the 



270 AN INQUIRENDO 

London parks and drives ; his second, for 
the London stage. The way was soon 
cleared for those dramas which managers 
must now handle, as Thoreau handled a 
certain newspaper, " with cuffs turned 
up " ; but these, despite their build and 
basis, have never been surpassed for wit, 
vitality, and mastery of incident. The 
plavs seen by our friends Mr. and Mrs. 
Pepys from the middle gallery, were 
nearly all equipped at the expense of the 
King and gentry, and were brought out 
with nice details of costly scenery and 
costuming. Charles, Queen Catherine, 
and the Duke of York even gave their 
coronation suits to the actors. When 
Nokes played Sir Arthur Addle, in 1670, 
before the beautiful Duchess of Orleans, 
young Monmouth, beautiful as she, loos- 
ened the jewelled sword and belt which he 
wore, and enthusiastically clasped them 
upon the comedian, proud of both to his 
dying day. Charles originated the plot of 
Crowne's sprightly production, Sir Courtly 
Nice (the King died the night of its final 
rehearsal), and also that of Dryden's Secret 
Love : he was very vain of the latter when 
it was nobly cast, in 1666, and always 



AN INQUIRENDO 271 

delighted to have it called his play. He 
was responsible, in the same degree, for 
Oronokoo : for it was he who first dis- 
cerned, in the affecting tale of the West 
Indian insurrection of slaves, led by an 
enslaved prince, choice material for a 
tragedy. 

He was no reader, no student, in the 
usual sense : he read folk, and not folios. 
Newcastle had written him, then the child 
Prince of Wales : " Whensoever you are 
too studious, your contemplation will spoil 
your government ; for you cannot be a 
good contemplative man, and a good com- 
monwealth's man. Therefore take heed 
of too much book." Never was tutor 
eventually better obeyed. Charles was a 
shrewd observer ; he could sift ambassa- 
dors, ministers, and " persons of quality," 
as ably as Elizabeth herself; and remain, 
the while, impervious as rock. His early 
education was neglected : he was forced 
too soon into active life. Fortunately, he 
had the aesthetic bent of his race : thought 
and travel taught this Oxonian, by easy 
processes, ail he knew. He became a 
good mathematician, and a good draughts- 
man ; he was something of an expert in 



272 AN INQUIRENDO 

anatomy ; he perfectly understood the 
sciences of fortification and shipping. He 
once invited his beloved Prince Rupert to 
race " the two sloopes builte at Woolidge, 
which have my invention in them." (It 
is to be hoped the landsman Rupert of 
the Rhine did not command his crew, as 
Monk did, to wheel to the left !) Charles 
was as thorough a sailor as his brother, 
and would have made as fair a record 
on deck, had his lines been cast there. 
Aboard "The Surprise" Tattersal averred 
that he directed the course better than 
himself. It was this King who gave the 
charter to the Royal Society, and founded 
the Observatory at Greenwich, as well as 
the Mathematical School at Christ Hos- 
pital. Nor were these things done per- 
functorily, but from close personal interest. 
Charles could gossip in several languages. 
His taste for chemistry was almost as 
marked as his cousin Rupert's ; and in 
the month he died, he was running a pro- 
cess for fixing mercury. Cowley, before 
that period, had lapsed into a pretty con- 
ceit about his liege lord in the laboratory. 

** Where, dreaming chemics, are your pain and cost ? 
How is your toil, how is your labor lost! 



AN INQUIRENDO 273 

Our Charles, blest alchemist, (tho' strange. 
Believe it, future times ! ) did change 
The Iron Age of old 
Into this Age of Gold." 

Dr. Burney remarks, and almost with jus- 
tice, that the King seems never to have 
considered music as anything but an in- 
centive to gayety. Catherine of Braganza 
had a genuine passion for the art, and was 
its munificent patron so long as she re- 
mained in England. It is well to remem- 
ber, when Charles is accused of developing 
only the newly-imported French music, 
that in his day cathedral organs were re- 
established, and the way was opened for the 
return of those beautiful choral services 
which had a potent successive influence 
over Purcell, Croft, Bennet, Barnby, and 
which have forever enriched themselves 
through association with these dedicated 
talents. The King had examined the 
principles of Romanesque architecture 
with some enthusiasm. No one followed 
Wren's great labor, after the Fire, espe- 
cially in S. Paul's, with closer attention ; 
and when he had a practical suggestion in 
mind, no one could have offered it more 
modestly. It was not Charles the Second 
18 



274 AN INQUIRENDO 

who hampered that great man, and vexed 
his heart with mean conditions. He had 
a rational admiration for Wren ; it did 
not prevent him, however, from jesting on 
occasion. The architect was a very little 
man, and the King a very tall one. They 
had an amiable dispute at Winchester. 
" I think the middle vault not high 
enough." " It is high enough, your 
Majesty." With the same air, no doubt, 
the young Mozart contradicted his Arch- 
duke : " The number of notes is not at 
all too many, but exactly sufficient." In 
this case, the critic looked at the roof, and 
then he looked at Wren. Presently, he 
crumpled himself up, and brought his 
anointed person erect, within four feet of 
the floor, as if from the other's illiberal 
point of view. " High enough, then. Sir 
Christopher ! " he said. 

His relation to literary men was one of 
ample appreciation and no pay. He is 
reported to have wished to buy the favor 
of George Wither, and especially of An- 
drew Marvell : yet he never approximately 
endeavored to discharge his long-standing 
debts to his own choir. Sedley, Edmund 
Waller, Rochester, and the Roscommon 



AN INQUIRENDO 275 

of " unspotted lays/' were in no need of 
encouragement ; but it would have befitted 
Charles to do something for the others, 
before it was too late. It seems to have 
been his purpose to make Wycherley tutor 
to the Duke of Richmond, at fifteen hun- 
dred pounds a year, had not Wycherley, 
in the nick of time, snubbed the King by 
marrying Lady Drogheda, and drifted 
into the Fleet prison. The poets always 
returned his liking. Though he was an 
entrancingly pat subject for pasquinades, 
even Marvell touched him gently. 

**I'll wholly abandon all public affairs. 

And pass all my time with buffoons and with 

players. 
And saunter to Nelly when I should be at prayers. 

I '11 have a fine pond, with a pretty decoy, 
Where many strange fowl shall feed and enjoy. 
And still in their language quack Five le roy.*^ 

Charles, at his birth, came into the 
poetic atmosphere of his more poetic 
father. When the latter set out, at the 
head of a triumphant train, to return 
thanks at the Cathedral for his heir, the 
planet Venus {ahstit omen !) was clearly 
shining in the May-noon sky. The 



276 AN INQUIRENDO 

people saw it, and were wild with super- 
stitious delight; and they recalled it at 
the Restoration. Festal lyres, because of 
it, were struck with redoubled zest. 
" Bright Charles," Crashaw began ; and 
old Ben Jonson's voice arose in greeting : 

*' Blest be thy birth 
That hath so crowned our hopes, our spring, our 
earth." 

And Francis Quarles, not long after, 
quaintly offered his Divine Fancies to 
the " royall budde," " acknowledging my- 
self thy servant, ere thou knowest thyself 
my Prince." Again, no sooner was 
Charles the Second laid in his grave, than 
the flood of seventeenth-century pane- 
gyric, which he had never invited, but 
held back considerably while he lived, 
burst forth over England : unstemmed by 
any compensating welcomes for the as- 
cendant Duke of York. Dryden, in his 
Threnodia Angus talis, Otway, Montagu, 
Earl of Halifax, and a hundred lesser 
bards, intoned the requiem. Most of this 
prosody is pretty flat : but it has feeling. 
One of Richard Duke's stanzas is ques- 
tionable enough ; only the shortsighted- 



AN INQUIRENDO 277 

ness of genuine grief can save it from 
worse than audacity. Following Dryden 
in his quasi-invocation, he named the dead 
King as " Charles the Saint " ; and wher- 
ever the poor ghost chanced to be, that 
surely hurt him like an arrow. 

If he was not so protective as he might 
have been to his poets, it was not owing 
to any parsimony on his part. He was 
by nature a giver. The thrifty Teutons 
who inherited the throne and the royal 
bric-a-brac have long begrudged divers 
treasures scattered by Charles among per- 
sons and corporations of his individual 
fancy. While in exile, he had sold his 
favorite horses, to provide comforts for 
his suite; and in 1666, when he was in 
need of all he had, he allowed nothing to 
interfere with his lavish and wisely-placed 
donations to the houseless City. Perhaps 
he neglected the fees of literature, as he 
neglected to put up a monument to his 
father's memory : not because he failed to 
know his duties, but because he must 
have held your true procrastinator's creed, 
and discovered, in the end, that what can 
be done at any time gets done at no time. 
Dryden helps us to think, however, that 



278 AN INQUIRENDO 

the King was not wholly oblivious of his 
bookmen : 

'* Tho' little was their hive and light their gain. 
Yet somewhat to their share he threw." 

Perhaps he was almost as liberal as his 
gaping pocket allowed. Long-headed 
sirens^ too, were battening on the national 
revenues, and Charles had no strength of 
purpose left to withstand them. He had 
bartered that for rose-leaves and musk 
and mandragora : eternal quackeries which 
had never for an instant eased him of his 
sore conscience. For downright hypo- 
crisy (to which, with whatever wry faces, 
he had to come), nothing in the snuffling 
deeps of Puritanism can beat the wording 
of a clause in the grant made to Barbara, 
Countess of Castlemaine, in 1670, when 
she received her magnificent domains, 
titles, and pensions, "in consideration," as 
the patent states, " of her noble descent, 
her father's death in the service of the 
crown, and by reason of her personal 
virtues." This lady " hectored the King's 
wits out of him." The reason is not far to 
seek why Butler went hungry, and delici^ 
decus desiderium cevi sui, otherwise Abra- 



AN INQUIRENDO 279 

ham Cowley, Esquire, felt that his fidelity 
was at a discount. Royalty occasionally 
tossed gold to its admired Dryden, in the 
shape of several capital suggestions, which 
availed, as we know. " Now, were I a 
poet (and I think I am poor enough to 
be one), I should make a satire upon 
sedition." The parenthesis is sympa- 
thetic. The knights of the ink-bottle 
were very welcome to Whitehall ; there 
was no class with which Charles, who was 
not a promiscuous friend, liked better to 
surround himself It is a pity he did not 
have illustrious opportunity to associate 
with the best of these altogether and for- 
ever, as his cousin of France did, as he 
himself seemed born to do ; for he had the 
patronal temperament. There is a beau- 
tiful expression in Montesquieu, which 
might be applied as sanctioning as a virtue 
the passive intellectual perception of the 
Stuarts : " Que le prince ne craint point 
ses rivaux qu'on appelle les hommes de 
merite : il est leur egal des qu'il les aime." 
This is the principle of faith without 
good works. Charles the Second, inter- 
preted by it, ought to cut a rather fair 
figure before posterity. 



28o AN INQUIRENDO 

He was no stranger to a pen. How 
well he could employ it, his speeches, 
letters, and despatches show. Grace and, 
point are in every line. He had, in fact, 
a curious neat mastery of words, not to 
be excelled by most trained hands. Good 
pithy prose came easy to him : which is a 
phenomenon, since nobody expects King's 
English from a king. He had much to 
write, " and often in odd situations," as 
Mr. Disraeli the elder amicably adds. 
His performances in rhyme seem to have 
been discredited by himself, and are, per- 
haps happily, irrecoverable. Excellent 
David Lloyd, of Oriel, mentions " several 
majestick Poems *' of Charles's youth. He 
does not quote them. " Majestick " re- 
minds one of the reputed Muse paternal, 
pontificating from Carisbrooke : 

"And teach my soul, that ever did confine 
Her faculties in Truth's seraphic line. 
To track the treason of Thy foes and mine." 

The son's productions were not quite of 
this order, if we may judge from a speci- 
men given by Burney, in the appendix to 
his History of Music, It is an artificial 
pastoral, in singable numbers, which Pel- 



AN INQUIRENDO 281 

ham Humphrey took pains to set in D 
major. 

Humphrey was an ex-chorister boy 
then newly come back from over seas, to 
be " mighty thick with the King '' ; bring- 
ing with him French heresies of time and 
tune. Charles had musical theories of his 
own ; and would sit absently in chapel, 
swaying his head to Master Humphrey's 
rhythm, and laughing at a dissonance in 
the anthem before the singers themselves 
were half-conscious of the slip. When 
he was not sleeping there, he seems to 
have done a deal of laughing in chapel. 
On one classic occasion, his father felt 
called upon to " hit him over the head 
with his staff," in S. Mary the Virgin's, 
Oxford, "for laughing at sermon-time 
upon the ladies that sat against him." 
He sang tenor to Gostling's great bass : 
the Duke of York (afterwards James the 
Second) accompanying them upon the 
guitar. His favorite song was an English 
one, and a very grave one : Shirley's beau- 
tiful dirge in The Contention of Ajax and 
Ulysses : 

" The glories of our birth and state 
Are shadows, not substantial things." 



282 AN INQUIRENDO 

Many a time young Bowman was bid- 
den to the solitary king, and chanted 
those austere measures. The true sem- 
blance of the Merry Monarch, undreamed- 
of by Gibbons or Lely, would be his 
portrait as he sat listening, in a tapestried 
alcove, to the touching text on the vanity 
of mortal pride, and the ever-during fra- 
grance of "the actions of the just": his 
little dogs at his feet, his dark eyes fixed on 
the unconscious lad ; the motley somehow 
fallen from him, and a momentary truce 
set up between him and his defrauded 
thinking soul. How the court which he 
had taught, the court with its sarcasms and 
sallies, would have laughed at the prepos- 
terous situation ! Yet, if he had any 
outstanding spiritual characteristic, it was 
precisely this love for serious and worthy 
things. His perception of human excel- 
lence was never clouded. We all know 
his famous saying, which must have been 
more than half in jest, and unallowable 
even so, that the " honor " of every man 
and of every woman has its price. Yet 
this furious cynic was a tender believer in 
disinterestedness, wherever he found it. 
Not once or twice alone did he yield 



mmm 



AN INQUIRENDO 283 

applause to a life which followed virtue 
" higher than the sphery chime/' though 
his cue lay not in that part, though he 
went back on the morrow to the Horsel- 
berg. From the middle of the revelry 
which filled his opening years in London, 
he stole away privately to Richmond, to 
kneel beside the dying Bishop Duppa, 
and beg a blessing. He had a most 
deferent regard for Sir William Coventry. 
Towards the close of his life, he was 
troubled with memories of the fate of 
Sidney and Russell. He was not thinking 
of intellectual achievement when he said : 
" I hear that Mr. Cowley is dead. He 
hath left no better man behind him." 
He appreciated something else beside the 
comeliness of the sweet Duchess of Gram- 
mont (la belle Hamilton), when he wrote 
to his favorite sister in Paris : " Be kinde 
to her : for besides the meritt her family 
has, she is as good a creature as ever 
lived." That young lily of perfection, 
Mistress Godolphin, observed a rule of 
her own in never speaking to the King. 
How prudent, to be sure, and how 
obtuse ! And it will be admitted by 
every reader of historical gossip that, to 



284 AN INQUIRENDO 

whatever humiliations Charles subjected 
his poor queen (who ceased not to love 
him, and to love his memory) he would 
at no time hear her disparaged, were she 
even so disparaged ostensibly for his own 
political advantage. For he respected in 
her the abstract unprofanable woman. 
He wrote to his Chancellor, on his first 
sight of Catherine, who had been described 
to him as an ugly princess : " Her face is 
not so exact as to be called a beauty, 
though her eyes are excellent good ; and 
not anything on her face that can in the 
least shoque one. On the contrary, she 
has as much agreebleness altogether in 
her look as ever I saw, and if I have any 
skill in Physiognomy (which I think I 
have !) she must be as good a woman as 
ever was born.'* And again : " I must 
be the worst man living, (which I hope I 
am not,) if 1 be not a good husband." In 
Edward Lake's diary, we are told that to 
the patron who recommended Dr. Sud- 
bury to the Deanery of Durham, and 
Dr. Sandcroft to that of S. Paul, the King 
said, after some years of that attentive 
observation of his saints which no one 
would suspect in him : " My lord, recom- 



AN INQUIRENDO 285 

mend two more such to me, and I will 
return you any four I have for them." 
Most pertinent of all such cases, was that 
of the beloved Bishop Ken. When the 
King went to Winchester, in 168 1, to 
superintend Wren's building of his palace, 
he put up at the Deanery, and sent word 
to Ken, then one of the Prebendaries, to 
resign his house to Nell Gwynne. Ken 
stoutly refused, to the fear and amazement 
of the time-servers. Three years later, 
the last year of the King's life, there was 
a great scramble for a rich vacant see. 
Charles did not lack a dramatic inspira- 
tion. " Od's fish ! " he cried : " who shall 
have Bath and Wells but the little fellow 
that would not give poor Nelly a lodg- 
ing ! " In 1679, ^^^ ^^^g ^^^ h^s ^^^^ ^o 
keep in their high offices the many useful 
and loyal magistrates whom his councillors 
voted to supplant on account of their 
being " favourable to Popery." His more 
general plea having been passed by, he 
read the list of names over again, before 
placing the signature which he could no 
longer refuse; and since his opposition 
was then as strenuous as ever, took leave 
of the subject in some remembered oblique 



286 AN INQUIRENDO 

remarks. Why depose Such-a-one ? He 
had peerless beef in his larder, and no 
kickshaws. What had So-and-so done, 
that he should be removed ? Surely, no 
man kept better foxhounds ! And he 
could not only thus discern and prefer 
goodness, but he submitted himself to it, 
and bore reproofs from it with boyish 
humbleness. There is no reminiscence 
of the Princess comic catechumen experi- 
ences in Scotland, in the accents of " your 
affectionate friend, Charles Rex," addressed 
to the admonishing Mr. James Hamilton, 
a minister of Edinburgh, from Saint 
Germain. " Yours of the 26th May 
was very welcome to me, and I give you 
hearty thanks for all your good counsel, 
which I hope God will enable me the 
better to follow through your prayers : 
and I conjure you still to use the same 
old freedom with me, which I shall always 
love." But his instinct was sharp : his 
sarcasms were forth in a moment against 
mere bullies and meddlers. Checked 
once for employing a light oath, he had 
ready a shockingly brusque though legiti- 
mate retaliation : " Your Martyr swore 
twice more than ever I did ! " 



AN INQUIRENDO 287 

As we have seen, he had no appetite 
whatever for compHments. He probably 
thought quite as Pepys did, regarding the 
silly adulations lavished on a certain Janu- 
ary tennis-playing. " Indeed, he did play 
very well, and deserved to be commended ; 
but such open flattery is beastly." Charles 
jils habitually " kept his head," as we say 
in one of the most telling of our English 
idioms. It was difficult indeed so to do, 
through the highest known fever of na- 
tional enthusiasm, while he v/as fed every 
hour of every day with praises out of 
all proportion to the deeds of an Alex- 
ander. Virtuous men like Cowley went 
into frenzies of approbation at the outset 
of the reign ; sensible men like Evelyn 
thanked Heaven with seraphic devotion 
for each execution and exhumation where- 
with the King, or rather the wild popu- 
lar will, to which he was no breakwater, 
signalized his entry. Hear the same 
temperate Evelyn, in a dedication : " Your 
Majesty was designed of God for a bless- 
ing to this nation in all that can render it 
happy ; if we can have the grace but to 
discover it, and be thankful for it." Gen- 
uine toadies had small countenance from 



288 AN INQUIRENDO 

this acute Majesty. When he propounded 
his celebrated joke to The Royal Society, 
concerning a dead fish, i. e,^ that a pail of 
water receiving one would weigh no more 
than before, and when he watched the 
wiseacres all solemnly conferring, it can- 
not have been that they were unanimously 
caught by the impish query he had put 
upon them, but rather that they would 
avoid correcting the Crown : fain would 
they humor it with an acquiescent reason 
why. But one little hero of science, far 
down the table, greatly daring, spake : " I 
— I — I do believe the pail would weigh 
heavier ! " and was acquitted by a peal of 
the royal laughter : " You are right, my 
honest man." Waller's clever excuse, 
when rallied on his fine Cromwellian 
strophes, and on their superiority to those 
written for the King's home-coming, that 
" poets succeed better in fiction than in 
truth," must have been met with the 
appreciative smile due to so exquisite a 
casuistry. Persons chosen to preach 
before Charles, bored him, long after his 
accession, with superfluous abuse of the 
Regicides and of the mighty Protectorate 
in general. One bishop, squarely asked 



AN INQUIRENDO 289 

why he read his sermons instead of deliver- 
ing them impromptu, made the elegant re- 
sponse to his questioner, that it was for awe 
of such august assemblies, and of so wise 
a prince. Charles instantly rejoined that 
it was a monstrous pity no such consider- 
ation weighed with himself, in reading his 
speeches in the House : for the truth was, 
he had prayed for money so often, he 
could no longer look his hearers in the 
face ! To the Earls of Carlisle and 
Shaftesbury, unduly anxious for the Pro- 
testant succession, who announced them- 
selves as able to prove Monmouth's legi- 
timacy, to the satisfaction of the nation, 
the King replied : " Dearly as I love the 
Duke, rather than acknowledge him 
v/ill I see him hanged on Tyburn tree.'* 
Plain-speaking at a crisis was the hall- 
mark of the loose and conniving time. 
When a clergyman of the Establishment 
was called to see the Duke of Bucking- 
ham, and inquired, by way of the usual pre- 
liminary, in what religion he had lived, 
the dying firefly answered gallantly: " In 
none, I am well pleased to say ; for I 
should have been a disgrace to any. Can 
you do me any good now, bestir your- 

19 



290 AN INQUIRENDO 

self." It was this engaging reprobate, 
(remembered rather through Pope and 
Dryden than through his own extraordi- 
nary talent) to whom the King once gave 
a kindly but authoritative rebuke for his 
atheistic talk. It is possible that on that 
occasion fastidiousness, and not reverence, 
was the motive power in Charles. 

For it was his humor to disarm all 
moral questions by applying to them the 
measure of mere good taste. We know 
the characteristic exception he took to 
Nonconformity, as being " no religion for 
a gentleman." He had, in the perfect 
degree, what Mr. James Russell Lowell 
calls " that urbane discipline of man- 
ners, which is so agreeable a substitute 
for discipline of mind." As in Prince 
Charlie, (whose career was so closely to 
resemble his own, much in its heyday, 
and more in its decline), winning courtesy 
was founded on genuine sweetness of 
nature. He brought back into storm- 
beaten England the vision of the Cava- 
lier : a vision like a rainbow, which made 
beholders giddy. The very first things 
he did, on his triumphant entry into Lon- 
don, on May 29th, 1660, were gracious 



AN INQUIRENDO 291 

grand-opera things : he singled out the 
pink-cheeked hostess of The Rose, in the 
Poultry, kissing his hand to her, as he 
passed ; and he brought the tears to the 
eyes of Edmund Lovell, riding at 
the head of his troop of horse raised for 
the Restoration, by drawing off his rich 
leather gauntlets then and there, as a 
memento of thanks for one loyal welcome. 
Such a carriage was sure to establish him 
in the popular heart : he might light his 
fire with Magna Charta ! His tact and 
his evenness of deportment stood forth 
like moral perfections. Addison, who, as 
a child, had seen the King humming 
lyrics over D'Urfey's shoulder, and knew 
all the folk-tales of his twenty-five years* 
reign, must surely have been thinking of 
him, when he painted this picture of " one 
of Sir Roger's ancestors." " He was a 
man of no justice, but great good man- 
ners. He ruined everybody that had 
anything to do with him, but never said 
a rude thing in his life ; the most in- 
dolent person in the world, he would 
sign a deed that passed away half his 
estate, with his gloves on, but would not 
put on his hat before a lady, if it were 



292 AN INQUIRENDO 

to save his country." All this enchant- 
ing punctilio was but the velvet sheathing 
of uncommon power and purpose. Charles 
was never off his guard. No contingency 
ever got the better of him. He had rea- 
sons for being gentle and affable, for be- 
ing, as the peerless Lady Derby thought 
him, on her own staircase, " the most 
charming prince in the world," for keep- 
ing his extremely happy chivalry of 
speech, equal to that of his cousin Louis 
the Fourteenth : the speech " which gives 
delight and hurts not." " Civility can- 
not unprince you," was another saying of 
the Newcastle beloved of his childhood, 
who seems to have had a strong influence 
over him. The gay address and gentle 
bearing, deliberate as we now perceive 
them to have been, had the highest ex- 
trinsic value in that severe masculine per- 
sonality. "These advantages," says a 
contemporary writer, " were not born with 
him, for he was too reserved in his 
youth." It is ludicrous that we should 
speak of him as The Merry Monarch. 
He was, in sober truth, under his beau- 
tiful mask of manners, a morose, tor- 
mented, unhappy man. It was part of 



AN INQUIRENDO 293 

his perfect courage that he had learned 
small talk, banter, puns, games, and 
dances : they were so many weapons to 
keep the blue devils at bay. He had to 
beguile the thing he was with perpetual 
cap and bells. Before he became a dis- 
tinguished actor, he was not " merry." 
The gilded courtiers of France, during his 
exile, found him a serious and awkward 
figure of a lad ; his admired Mademoiselle 
Montpensier, the great prime-ministerial 
Mademoiselle, trailing her new satin 
gowns back and forth under Henrietta 
Maria's knowing eye, looked on Henri- 
etta Maria's son, standing reticent the 
while, lamp in hand, with girlish derision. 
Nothing in human history is plainer, I 
think, than this double personality of 
Charles the Second, evoked by the in- 
escapable situation in which he lived and 
died. He had the benefit of parental 
example, and he started life as a good, 
slow, attractive, thoughtful child, the sad- 
eyed child of Vandyck's tender portraits 
between 1632 and 1642. He was not 
strong of frame then. " His Highness' 
particular grief," we smile to read in the 
pages of the good Lloyd, " is thought to 



294 AN INQUIRENDO 

be a consumption." From that house 
where all the children were fondly meas- 
ured and painted and chronicled from 
year to year, his mother wrote of him to 
Madame Saint George, and to Marie de 
Medicis. " He has no ordinary mien . . . 
he is so full of gravity/* Prince James, 
however, was her favorite. At four years 
old, Charles staggered some Oxford dons 
with a display of infant philosophy. A 
twelvemonth before that, as we learn from 
a pretty passage in the Harleian MSS., 
he had been condemned to take a certain 
drug ; and his attempts to get off, his 
retaliating talk afterward, are already very 
much of a piece with the makeshifts of 
the Charles the Second we know. But in 
general, he cannot be said to have been 
in the bud what he was in the flower. 
Besides his seriousness, he had other 
apparently exotic qualities : piety and 
candor among them. Lord Capell de- 
clared on the scaffold : " For certainly, I 
have been a counsellor to him, and have 
lived long with him, and in a time when 
discovery is easily enough made ; (he was 
about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and six- 
teen years of age, those years I was with 



AN INQUIRENDO 295 

hirtij) and truly I never saw greater hopes 
of virtue in any young person than in 
him : great judgment, great understand- 
ing, great apprehension ; much honor in 
his nature, and truly a very perfect 
Englishman in his inclination. And I 
pray God restore him to this kingdom." 
Montrose, on the scaffold, in his turn, 
" exceedingly commended," says Claren- 
don, in his History^ " the understanding 
of the present King." The glorious 
Marquis bore no testimony to Charles's 
ethic make-up : but that could have 
lacked no lustre in his eyes, since the 
January of the preceding year, when the 
heir to the crown twice offered his life, or 
the acceptance of any conditions imposed 
upon himself, in exchange for his father's 
safety. Madame de Motteville assures 
us that " the greatest heroes and sages of 
antiquity did not rule their lives by higher 
principles than this young Prince at the 
opening of his career." 

The poverty and inaction of his eleven 
years' exile, the sickness of hope deferred, 
the temporizing, the misery of his faithful 
friends, the wretched worry and privation 
of the sojourn at Brussels and Breda, he 



296 AN INQUIRENDO 

bore passing well : but they spoiled him. 
He grew recklessly indifferent ; at thirty 
he could have said his Diu viximus, for the 
savor of life was gone. An innate patrician, 
he could never have been ruined, as most 
men are all too ready to be, by " success 
and champagne.'* Hardship, which heart- 
ens the weak, was a needless ordeal for him : 
yet he had nothing else from his fourteenth 
to his thirty- first year. In him, endur- 
ance and courage were already proven, 
and the " mild, easy, humble " tempera- 
ment which, long after, was to be allotted 
to him in Absalom and Achitophel. His 
chief diversions, while abroad, were the 
single military campaign in Spain, the 
reading and staging of amateur plays, 
the ever-welcome associations with his 
brothers and sisters. When Grenville 
brought thirty thousand pounds, and the 
invitation from the Parliamentary Com- 
missioners, to the ragged royalties at the 
Hague, Charles called his dear Mary and 
James to look at the wonder, jingling it 
well before he emptied it from the port- 
manteau : a more innocent satisfaction than 
he was able to take later when, as Bussy 
de Rabutin remarked, " the King of Eng- 



AN INQUIRENDO 297 

land turned shopkeeper, and sold Dun- 
kirk," and rode to the Tower to see the 
first three milHon livres rolled into his 
coffers. That he managed to fight beset- 
ting trouble may be inferred from his 
letters to Mr. Henry Bennet. " Do not 
forget to send me the Gazette Burlesque 
every week. . . . My cloaths at last 
came, and I like them very well, all but 
the sword, which is the worst that ever I 
saw. . . . We pass our time as well as 
people can do, that have no more money, 
for we dance and play as if we had taken 
the Plate Fleet. . . . Pray get me pricked 
down as many new corrants and sarre- 
bands, and other little dances, as you can, 
and bring them with you ; for I have got 
a small fiddler that does not play ill on 
the fiddle." King Charles the First, in his 
affecting last advices to his eldest son, had 
apprehended nothing but good results for 
him from the difficult circumstances of his 
minority. " This advantage of wisdom 
have you above most Princes, that you 
have begun and now spent some years of 
discretion in the experience of trouble and 
the exercise of patience. . . . You have 
already tasted of that cup whereof I have 



298 AN INQUIRENDO 

liberally drunk, which I look upon as 
God's physic, having that in healthfulness 
which it lacks in pleasure." But too 
much trial is enervating, as well as too 
little. Could the spirited Prince have 
had, ever and again, through those dark 
seasons, a pittance of the abounding pros- 
perity which befell him after he had given 
up self-discipline, and had almost given 
up hope, it might have saved from fatal 
torpor " the only genius of the Stuart 
line." 

So perverted grew his habit of mind, 
that eventually the strongest incentives 
could barely move, anger, or rouse him. 
To act like a man awake, he needed 
a shock, an emergency. He was of 
the greatest possible use at the Fire ; 
he was of no use at all during the 
Plague. Planning a thing out, thinking 
of it beforehand, came to be intolerable 
to him. He who feared nothing else, 
feared communion with himself. " For 
he dared reflect, and be alone," is a sen- 
tence in the Warwick Memoirs^ touching 
Charles the First, which looks as if it were 
intended for an oblique comment on his 
son. As it was, even at the worst, he 



AN INQUIRENDO 299 

prided himself on certain temperances. 
He liked good wine, but he kept his 
brain clear of hard drinking. " It is a 
custom your soul abhors," said the 
Speaker of the Commons before him, 
in the August of 1660. He liked a 
game of chance, but he never won or 
lost a pound at dice. In a time of the 
silliest superstition, when my lord and 
my lady conferred mysteriously with M. 
le Voisin or the Abbe Pregnani over in 
France, to whom the casting of horo- 
scopes and the concocting of philters were 
" easy as lying," Charles held his own 
strong-minded attitude, and was delighted 
to see some applauded predictions quite 
overturned in the Newmarket races. " I 
give little credit to such kind of cattle," 
he writes to Henrietta, " and the less you 
do it, the better ; for if they could tell 
anything, 't is inconvenient to know one's 
fortune beforehand, whether good or 
bad." Yet he amused himself with the 
psychological, when it suited him. " Sir 
A. H. and Mrs. P., I beleeve, will end 
in Matrimony : I conclude it the rather 
because I have observed a cloud in his 
face, any time these two months, which 



300 AN INQUIRENDO 

Giovanni Battista della Porta, in his Phy- 
sionomia, says, foretells misfortune." He 
frowned on irreligion, and stopped reli- 
gious controversy with a wave of his 
hand. " No man," says Roger North, 
" kept more decorum in his expression 
and behavior in regard to things truly 
sacred than the King, . . . And amongst 
his libertines, he had one bigot, at least, 
(Mr. Robert Spencer) whom he called 
Godly Robin, and who used to reprove 
the rest for profane talking." 

" Until near twenty," we learn from an 
anonymous pamphleteer who claims to 
have been eighteen years in the Prince's 
friendship and service, " until near twenty, 
the figure of his face was very lovely. 
But he is since grown leaner, and now 
the majesty of his countenance supplies 
the lines of beauty." " Majesty " sounds 
euphemistic ; yet there was a great deal 
of genuine majesty in Charles the Second. 
Black armor was always wonderfully be- 
coming to him, as we see in at least one 
Cooper miniature, in the print by Faith- 
orne, and the rarer one by Moncornet. 
The lines of his cheek and mouth were 
very marked ; when he needlessly began 



AN INQUIRENDO 301 

to wear a wig, their severity became in- 
tensified. He had the shadowy Stuart 
eyes, red-brown, full of soft light; but 
his look, in all of his portraits, is some- 
thing so sombre that we have no Eng- 
lish word for it : it is morne, it is macabre. 
Leigh Hunt well implies, in The Town, 
that such an appearance, linked with such 
a character, was a witticism in itself. He 
says : " If the assembled world could 
have called out to have a specimen of 
' the man of pleasure ' brought before it, 
and Charles the Second could have been 
presented, we know not which would 
have been greater, the laughter or the 
groans.'* His face was brown as a 
Moor's, and singularly reserved and 
forbidding ; though " very, very much 
softened whensoever he speaks." One 
hardly knows why it was thought neces- 
sary to blacken it further with walnut- 
juice, for disguise, to provide the " reechy " 
appearance dwelt upon in Blount's narra- 
tive, when he set out from Boscobel. 
His long hair had been of raven hue, 
thick and glossy, " naturally curling in 
great rings " ; but at the Restoration he 
was already becoming " irreverendly gray." 



302 AN INQUIRENDO 

When he turned suddenly upon you, 
we read, in Ralph Esber (Hunt, first and 
last, shows a Rembrandtesque preoccupa- 
tion with this dusky King), " it was as if 
a black lion had thrust his head through 
a hedge in winter/' To the Rye House 
conspirators he was known as " the 
Blackbird," as they named the Duke of 
York, who was blonde, " the Goldfinch." 
It is a little curious that a Jacobite ballad, 
very familiar in Ireland, dating from 
before the Fifteen, bestows the same 
secret name (as a love-name, it need 
hardly be added) on James the Third, 
called the Pretender. James Howell, in 
a dedication to Charles the child, says : — 

*' Wales had one glorious Prince of haire and hue 
(Which colour sticks unto him still!) like you." 

Howell had in mind the Black Prince, 
when he set out so to compliment his 
swarthy little successor ; but he must have 
forgotten that the hero had his sobriquet 
from his dread prowess, or his armor, not 
from his complexion. Charles was well- 
made. " Le roi ne cedait a personne, ni 
pour la taille ni pour la mine." But he 
was too grim and gaunt to be handsome. 



AN INQUIRENDO 303 

Burnet, who had no regard for him, tells 
us that he resembled the Emperor Tibe- 
rius : " a statue of the latter at Rome 
looks like a statue made for him." (Any 
reader of Tacitus knows that the parallel 
could be maintained throughout. But 
it would be unfair. Tiberius, with all his 
high handed capability, was jealous and 
perfidious ; Tiberius, — this is the core 
of the matter, — could not take a joke !) 
Standing before the portrait of himself 
by Riley, Charles sighed sympathetically : 
" Od*s fish ! but I m the ugly fellow." 
Vanity was not in him, and he left the 
last refinements of the fashions, the creve- 
coeur locks and the passagere, and the 
venez-a-moi, to his retainers, to the men 
of great personal beauty, like the Villiers, 
Wilmots, and Sidneys, whom they be- 
came. He turned dress-reformer in 1666, 
and brought the whole court to habits of 
simplicity. No better and manlier cloth- 
ing ever was devised : the silk doublet 
and breeches, the collar, shoes and sword- 
belt of the time, without the slashes or 
the furbelows. But he was driven out 
of his model costume by the bantering 
motion of the French monarch, who im- 



304 AN INQUIRENDO 

mediately arrayed his footmen in it. This 
is a fine historic instance of the truth of 
Hazlitt's epigram : " Fashion is gentility 
running away from vulgarity, and afraid 
of being overtaken by it.'* At White- 
ladies, in old days, the young King was 
eager to get into his leathern doublet and 
white and green yarn stockings, " his 
Majesty refusing to have any gloves," 
though his hands were of tell-tale shape 
and slenderness. His fellow-fugitive, 
Lord Wilmot, was not so enchanted at 
the prospect of a peasant disguise ; " he 
saying that he should look frightfully in 
it." " Wilmot also endeavored to go on 
horseback," continues the playful King's 
own animated dictation to Pepys, "in 
regard, as I think, of his being too big to 
go on foot." Charles himself was a hard 
rider, though he preferred, whenever he 
could, to walk. His little suite had 
every reason to remember his posting 
through France and Spain, in 1659, when 
his energy tired them all out. His long 
legs always went at a tremendous pace. " I 
walked nine miles this morning with the 
King," Claverhouse writes wearily in 
1683, "besides cockfighting and courses." 



AN INQUIRENDO 305 

(He was waiting, in vain, to catch his sov- 
ereign in a humor for business.) Charles 
was fond of foot-racing, tennis, pall-mall, 
and all out-of-door sports. According to 
Reresby, he would have preferred re- 
tirement, angling, and hearty country 
life, to his thorny throne. But who, ex- 
cept a tyrant, would not ? Most of the 
Stuarts were excellent marksmen, and he 
among them. He took intelligent care 
of his health, and liked to weigh himself 
after exercise. We learn that his lonely 
leisure was sometimes invaded by afflicted 
but admiring subjects. " Mr. Avise 
Evans,'' writes dear garrulous Aubrey, 
" had a fungous nose ; and said it was 
revealed unto him that the King's hand 
would cure him ; so at the first coming 
of King Charles Second into S. James's 
Park, he kissed the royal hand and 
rubbed his nose with it. Which did 
disturb the King, but cured him." 

Charles's physical activity set in early ; 
he succeeded, at nine, in breaking his 
arm. All his life, he was up with the 
lark : it was almost the only circumstance 
in which he differed from Le Roi d'Tvetot, 
in Beranger's biting ballad, which did so 



3o6 AN INQUIRENDO 

take Mr. Thackeray ; and he played all 
morning and every morning. Early- 
risen Londoners, like the child Colley 
Gibber, used to watch him romping with 
his hounds and spaniels, stroking the 
deer, feeding the wooden-legged Balearic 
crane, or visiting the old lion in the 
Tower, not the least of his pets, whose 
death, accepted as a portent, was soon 
almost to coincide with his own. For 
birds he had a passion ; he was an un- 
exampled dog-lover. He squandered 
much of his professional time in the 
society, innocent at least, of these favorite 
animals, and much of his professional 
money, in seeking and reclaiming such of 
them as were lost. There is a funny 
little advertisement in Mercurius Publius 
for June 28th, 1660, the sly good-humor 
of which marks it as having been written 
out by none but the King himself. The 
advertisement was a renewed one. " We 
must call upon you again for a Black 
Dog, between a greyhound and a spaniel ; 
no white about him, onely a streak on his 
Brest, and Tayl a little bobbed. It is 
His Majesties own Dog, and doubtless 
was stoln, for the Dog was not born or 



AN INQUIRENDO 307 

bred in England, and would never for- 
sake his Master. Whosoever findes him, 
may acquaint any at Whitehall, for the 
Dog was better known at Court than 
those who stole him. Will they never 
leave robbing His Majesty ? Must he 
not keep a Dog ? This Dog's place, 
(though better than some imagine) is 
the onely place which nobody offers to 

It is not uncharacteristic of his hatred 
of suffering, that it was Charles the Sec- 
ond who abolished the statute which had 
thoughtfully provided for the roasting of 
heretics. He might quite as well have 
aboHshed " cockfighting and courses," but 
he did not. On a certain 22nd of July, 
he wrote to his " deare, deare Sister " 
Henrietta : " I am one of those Bigotts 
who thinke that malice is a much greater 
sinn than a poore frailty of nature." And 
Burnet has assured us that the same remark 
was made, by the same moralist, to him, 
" that cruelty and falsehood are the worst 
vices " : an opinion of pedigree, antedated 
by Taliesin, Chief of the Bards, in the 
sixth century. It would seem an irresis- 
tible inference that Butler must have heard 



3o8 AN INQUIRENDO 

of the royal speculation when he penned 
his immortal couplet : 

** Compound for sins they are inclined to. 
By damning those they have no mind to.'* 

(Charles used to carry in his pocket a 
copy of Hudibras which Buckhurst gave 
him.) Cruelty, especially, was very far 
from this indulgent King. His first offi- 
cial appearance had been on an errand of 
mercy. As a spectator of ten, he had sat 
through the first session of Strafford's trial, 
" in his little chair beside the throne " ; 
but he was sent as Prince of Wales, to 
carry his father's letter to the Peers, urg- 
ing them to forbear or delay Strafford's 
execution. As the young nominal leader 
of the army in the west, he was full of 
compassion. "There's a child," said the 
Earl of Lindsay, " born to end this war 
we now begin. How gravely doth he pity 
the dead, the sick, the maimed ! " His 
nature was thoroughly humane ; and 
more : it was affectionate. It is the 
modern fashion to say he had no feeling. 
In this regard he has never been fairly 
appraised, and no wonder ! He affected 
cynicism, and disclaimed sensitiveness ; 



AN INQUIRENDO 309 

he made no confidences ; he avoided 
" scenes/' Yet he originated at least two 
scenes, which may be worth something to 
those who recognize true emotion, from 
whatever unexpected source, and honor it. 
One was in 1663, when the good Queen 
fell very ill, and when Charles, more and 
more conscience-stricken, dropped beside 
the bed, and begged her, with tears, to 
live for his sake. The other was when 
he himself lay dying, in his fifty-fifth 
year ; when his old friend, the Benedictine 
priest, John Huddleston, came into the 
room before the lords, physicians, and gay 
gentlemen, to reconcile him to the Catho- 
lic Church, and give him the Holy Com- 
munion. The King was extremely weak, 
and in the greatest pain ; but he was with 
difficulty kept in his recumbent positi(5n. 
" I would kneel," he said aloud several 
times, endeavoring to rise, " I would kneel 
to my Heavenly Lord." What if by such 
touching demonstrations, rather than by 
his miserable stifling stoicism, his taint of 
drugged indifference, he were to be 
judged ? But to some he had always 
shown his heart. The dearest to him 
were those longest about him : even his 



3IO AN INQUIRENDO 

old nurse, Mrs. Wyndham, had an extra- 
ordinary hold upon him. He was kind- 
ness itself to his sister-in-law, Anne Hyde, 
the first Duchess of York, at the very 
time when she was exposed to ridicule, 
and most needed a powerful friend ; and 
he was no less kind to her successor, Mary 
of Modena, who never forgot him. His 
attachment to Monmouth is beyond ques- 
tion ; yet it was no greater than his at- 
tachment to James, whose succession he 
safeguarded, with whom he had few quali- 
ties in common. For besides being the 
perfect companion Hume allows him to 
have been, he was a perfect brother. 
Mrs. Ady (Julia Cartright) justly ob- 
serves, in the preface to Madame, her 
valuable memoir of Charles the First's 
youngest daughter, Henrietta, Duchess 
of Orleans, that the private letters from 
the French archives, there first printed, 
written by Charles the Second, establish 
two novel points greatly in his favor : 
" the courage and spirit with which he 
could defend the privileges of his subjects 
and the rights of the British flag," and 
the extreme love and concern he had for 
his only surviving sister. Patriotism and 



AN INQUIRENDO 311 

affection are about the last things of which 
historians seem even yet likely to accuse 
him. Let us have a few of these episto- 
lary extracts, at random ; they are delight- 
ful, and worded with a careless idiomatic 
force equal to that of any correspondence 
of the time. Moreover, they make one 
surmise that a volume of Charles's less 
accessible letters to his mother and Prince 
Rupert, those to his sister Mary, not ex- 
cluding the beautiful one on the occasion 
of their father's death, those to Clarendon, 
Lord Jermyn and others, would make, 
if collected from the private packets or 
state papers where they lie unread, in his 
own delicate, clear, whimsical hand, an 
uncommonly pleasant publication. 

" To my deare, deare Sister. 

Pour Tavenir, je vous prie, ne me traitez pas 
avec tant de ceremonie, en me dormant tant de 
' majestes,' car je ne veux pas qu'il y ait autre 
chose entre nous deux, qu'amitie." 

" I will not now write to you in French, for 
my head is dosed with business ! " 

" Pray send me some images, to put in 
prayer-books : they are for my wife, who can 
gett none heere. I assure you it will be a great 
present to her, and she will looke upon them 



312 AN INQUIRENDO 

often ; for she is not onlie content to say the 
greate office in the breviere every day, but like- 
wise that of Our Lady too ; and this is besides 
goeing to chapell, where she makes use of none 
of these. I am iust now goeing to see a new 
play ; so I shall say no more but that I am 
intierly yours." (These are " the pretty pious 
pictures " which Pepys saw and admired.) 

" They who will not beleeve anything to be 
reasonably designed unless it be successfully 
executed, have neede of a less difficult game to 
play than mine ; and I hope friends will thinke 
I am now too old, and have had too much 
experience of things and persons to be grossly 
imposed upon ; and therefore they who would 
seem to pity me so for being so often deceeved, 
do upon the matter declare what opinion they 
have of my understanding and judgment. And 
I pray you, discountenance those kind of 
people." 

" I hope it is but in a compliment to me, 
when you say my niece " (the little Marie- 
Louise d' Orleans, afterwards Queen of Spain) 
" is so like me : for I never thought my face was 
even so much as intended for a beauty ! I wish 
with all my heart I could see her ; for at this 
distance I love her." 

" Sir George Downing is come out of Hol- 
land, and I shall now be very busy upon that 



AN INQUIRENDO 313 

matter. The States keepe a great braying and 
noise, but I beleeve, when it comes to it, they 
will looke twise before they leape. I never saw 
so great an appetite to a warre as is in both this 
towne and country, espetially in the parlament- 
men, who, I am confident, would pawne there 
estates to maintaine a warre. But all this shall 
not governe me, for I will look meerly to what 
is just, and best for the honour and goode of 
England, and will be very steady in what I 
resolve : and if I be forsed to a warre, I shall 
be ready with as good ships and men as ever 
was seen, and leave the successe to God." 
(Here we have a sort of original for the modern 
chant : 

" We don't want to fight : 
But, by Jingo, if we do. 
We've got the ships, we've got the men. 
We 've got the money, too.") 

(Of Harry Killigrew.) " I am glad the poore 
wrech has gott a meanes of subsistence ; but 
have one caution of him, that you beleeve not 
one worde he sayes of us heere ; for he is a 
most notorious lyar, and does not want witt to 
sett forth his storyes pleasantly enough." 

" There is nobody desires more to have a 
strict frindship with the King of France than I 
do ; but I will never buy it upon dishonourable 
termes; and I thanke God my condition is not 



314 AN INQUIRENDO 

so ill but that I can stande upon my own legges, 
and beleeve that my frindship is as valuable to 
my neighbours as theirs is to me." 

" I have sent, this post, the extracts of the 
letters to my Ld. Hollis, by which you will see 
how much reason I have to stande upon the 
right my father had, touching the precedency of 
my ambassador's coach before those of the 
princes of the blood there. I do assure you, I 
would not insist upon it, if I had not cleerely 
the right on my side ; for there is nobody that 
hates disputes so much as I do, and will never 
create new ones, espetially with one whose 
frindship I desire so much as that of the King 
of France. But, on the other side, when I have 
reason, and when I am to yeelde in a point by 
which I must goe less than my predesessours 
have done, I must confesse that consernes me 
so much as no frindship shall make me consent 
unto." 

" Your kindnesse I will strive to diserve by 
all the endeavours of my life, as the thing in the 
worlde I value most." 

Charles was dear to the masses, as any 
ruler of his unimperious humor is sure 
to be. When the King and Queen came 
down from Hampton Court in their 
barge, the Thames watermen shouted 



AN INQUIRENDO 315 

cheerfully at him : " God bless thee, 
King Charles, and thy good woman there. 
Go thy ways for a wag ! " Among his 
inferior subjects he never lacked parti- 
sans and apologists. He was something 
of a hero even to his valet : faithful 
Tobias Rustat, Yeoman of the Robes, 
spent a fortune putting up statues, at 
Chelsea and Windsor, " domino suo cle- 
mentissimo." The Roundheads whom 
Charles had released, chiefly men of no 
rank or influence, watched him after, with 
friendliest longing and regret ; never 
without extenuations, and certain hope 
of change. " By enlarging us,'* they 
said in their message of thanks, " you 
have multiplied our captivity, and made 
us more your prisoners than we could be 
in the Tower." When Death gave him 
his abrupt summons, " amid inexpressible 
luxury and profaneness," on a wintry 
Monday in his town palace, the poor 
crowded the churches, for the whole six 
days, " sobs and tears interrupting the 
prayers of the congregations." Joy-bells 
and bonfires bespoke their relief at the 
mistaken report that he was convalescent. 
Every schoolboy, prentice, and serv- 



3i6 AN INQUIRENDO 

ing-maid in London wore mourning for 
him ; although he had been buried 
secretly by night, and there was no 
pageant at Westminster to memorialize 
their grief. Always, and despite all, he 
was sure of the loyalty of the people. 
" Fret not that I go unattended," he 
would tell his brother : " for they will 
never kill me, James, to make you 
king." " The horrid plot " found him 
the coolest head in England. But towards 
the end, it began to tell upon him and 
dash his spirits. He closed his doors 
for the first time, and went abroad with 
a guard, hurt and dejected. This was 
but an incident in a life as free from sus- 
picion as a tree's. The folk who came to 
see Charles at his masques and fairs and 
Twelfth-Night dice-throwings and Easter 
alms-givings ; the two hundred and forty 
thousand whom, with great boredom and 
greater patience, he touched for the King's 
Evil ; the multitudes who had experienced 
his concern and practical energy during the 
Fire, when he had done them all manner 
of personal service, — these were his 
vassals to the last. Nor had he ever a 
private enemy. He was popular in the 



AN INQUIRENDO 317 

extreme ; and might be commemorated 
as an admirable prince, if tested by the 
measure of Martial's epigram, that a 
prince's main virtue is intimate knowl- 
edge of his subjects. Tradition does not 
aver that he made integrity of living con- 
tagious among them, though society 
copied his tolerance and affability, his 
sense, spirit, and gracefulness. But 
nothing ever broke their faith in him. 
Says Lingard : " During his reign the 
arts improved, trade met with encourage- 
ment, the wealth and comforts of the 
people increased. To this flourishing 
state of the nation we must attribute the 
acknowledged fact, that whatever the per- 
sonal failings or vices of the King, he 
never forfeited the love of his subjects. 
Men are always ready to idolize the sov- 
ereign under whose sway they feel them- 
selves happy." Charles might have 
confessed with Elia : " How I like to 
be liked, and what don't I do to be 
liked ! " His wheedling charm was irre- 
sistible. He was an adept, when he 
willed, in the science of honeyed suasion. 
Like the Florentine painters, he could 
suffer no slovenly detail, nor a convention 



3i8 AN INQUIRENDO 

to pass him without some individualizing 
touch. Before he had contracted the 
Portuguese alliance. Count Da Ponte had 
taken his letter to Lisbon : " To the 
Queen of Great Britain, my wife and 
lady, whom God preserve." The blood 
royal has a pretty etiquette of its own ; 
not quite this, however. How beauti- 
fully, again, was it said to the Commons, 
shortly after the accession : " I know 
most of your faces and names, and can 
never hope to find better men in your 
places." And this intimate conciliatory 
tone, which it was Charles's pleasure to em- 
ploy towards others, others used in speak- 
ing of him. There is a fatherly pang in 
some of the little messages plying between 
the noble colleagues. Clarendon and Or- 
monde. " The King is as decomposed 
as ever : which breaks my heart. ... He 
seeks for his satisfaction and delight in 
other company, which do not love him so 
well as you and I do." And there is 
nothing tenderer in all history than the 
narration of Charles's leave-taking from 
his hushed Whitehall, written at the time 
by the Reverend Francis Roper, chaplain 
to the Bishop of Ely, unless it be an ac- 



AN INQUIRENDO 319 

count of the same strange and moving 
scene, sent later by the Catholic Earl of 
Perth to the Catholic Countess of Kin- 
cardine, on the tenth of December, 1685. 
Every street-corner evangelist may 
harp on the rottenness of the Restoration : 
what concerns us is its human sparkle. 
There was an astonishing dearth of dull 
people ; the bad and bright were in full 
blossom, and the good and stupid were 
pruned away. The company reminds one 
of Aucassin^s hell, which, on a certain 
occasion, he chose with such gusto, for its 
superior social qualities. " Charles the 
Second ! " exclaims William Hazlitt, in 
his most enjoying mood: "what an air 
breathes from the name ! What a rustle 
of silks and waving of plumes ! What a 
sparkle of diamond earrings and shoe- 
buckles ! What bright eyes ! (Ah, 
those were Waller's Sacharissa's, as she 
passed.) What killing looks and graceful 
motions ! How the faces of the whole 
ring are dressed in smiles ! How the 
repartee goes round ; how wit and folly, 
elegance, and awkward imitation of it, set 
one another off!" These are the days 
when young Henry Purcell bends for hours 



320 AN INQUIRENDO 

over the Westminster Abbey organ, alone ; 
and Child, Locke, Lawes, and Gibbons 
are setting ballads to entrancing cadences, 
and conveying them to Master W. Thack- 
eray, the music-printer, at The Angel, in 
Duck Lane ; when another Gibbons, 
rival of the spring, carving on wood, makes 
miraculous foliage indoors, to cheat the 
longing wind ; when a diligent Clerk of 
the Acts of the Navy, curiously scanning 
the jugglers and gymnasts on his leisurely 
way, trots by in " a camlett coat with 
silver buttons " ; when Robert Herrick, 
the town-loving country vicar, ordering 
his last glass, stands watching through the 
tavern window-pane the King gravely 
pacing the greensward with Hobbes and 
Evelyn, or bantering Nell Gwynne over 
her garden wall ; when Walton angles 
with his son Cotton in the Dove, and 
Claude Duval exquisitely relieves travel- 
lers' bags of specie ; when the musical 
street-cries run like intersecting brooks : 
" Rosemary and sweetbrier : who'll buy 
my lavender ? " " Fresh cheese and cream 
for you ! " " Oranges and citrons, fair 
citrons and oranges ! " when Richardson, 
the eater of glass and fire, is bidden to 



AN INQUIRENDO 321 

entertain in drawing-rooms, broiling an 
oyster on a live coal held in his mouth, 
and the instant he departs, hears the com- 
pany fall to playing blind-man's buff, and 
" I love my love with an A " ; when the 
click of duelling swords is heard in the 
parks at sundown, and groups of affec- 
tionate gentlemen sway homewards by the 
fainter morning ray, and coaches roll along 
lending glimpses of pliant fans, and of 
Lely's languishing faces. In and out of 
this whirl of thoughtless life move the 
august figures of Sir Thomas Browne and 
" that Milton that wrote for the regicides,*' 
and, later, of Sir Isaac Newton ; the golden 
shadow of Jeremy Taylor, and the childish 
footsteps of Steele and his head boy Addi- 
son, regenerators to be ; the vanishing 
presence of Clarendon, and the patriots, 
Russell, Vane, Algernon Sydney, good 
hearts in the dungeon and at the block ; 
of Bunyan the tinker, and the fighters 
Fairfax and Rupert, and the scholar poets 
who prodigally strew their delicate num- 
bers on the wind. Execrable ministries, 
Dutch defiances and insults, French pen- 
sions, pestilence and plot : but still the 
moth-hunts go on. " At all which I am 



,/y 



322 AN INQUIRENDO 

sorry, but it is the effect of idleness " (who 
should it be but Pepys, making this deep 
elemental excuse ?) " and having nothing 
else to employ their great spirits upon." 
The irised bubbles were soon to scatter, 
and the Hanoverian super-solids to come 
and stay. The great change is germinal, 
as all great changes are, and more visible 
in its processes than most. The reign of 
Charles the Second is full of supplements 
and reserves ; nothing is so lawless as it 
seems ; the genius ever unemployed, the 
virtue in arrest, " tease us out of thought," 
and change color under our eyes. Horn- 
pipes turn to misereres ; masks, one by 
one, fall away. Mrs. Aphra Behn, be it 
remembered, was, off the printed page, 
nothing more unspeakable than a decent 
industrious woman. That bygone Eng- 
land played at having no moral sense : on 
a subtle argument of Browning's, one may 
quarrel with it that it did not play equally 
well to the end. Neither was it the minor 
actor of the Restoration who, near the exit, 
flagged, saw visions, and spoke strange 
words out of his part : it was Rochester, 
it was Louise de Querouailles, it was the 
King. " Without desire of renown," 



AN INQUIRENDO 323 

Macaulay finds him, " without sensibility 
to reproach." Why arraign the King? 
He will agree with Macaulay or another, 
charge by charge : which is damaging to 
the arraigner. As for accusations not per- 
sonal, his retorts might be less gentle. 
Great Britain sued for him : and he never 
posed for a moment as other than he was. 
His coming hastened a reparative holiday ; 
itself but the breath of reaction. That 
inevitable abuses should be ranked among 
the laws of Nature, is one of Vauvenargues' 
fine profound inferences. If, in some of his 
inspirational moments, the King exceeded 
his prerogative (by endeavoring, for in- 
stance, to abrogate the code bearing so 
cruelly upon all persons of other religious 
opinions than those of the State), Parlia- 
ment and the people had foregone their 
right of complaint : they had deliberately 
chosen to make him an autocrat. No 
fanatic on any point, Charles would have 
bound himself readily to reasonable condi- 
tions, while his fortunes were pending ; 
yet no pledges were exacted. Moderate 
precautions and safeguards, suggested in 
the Commons by Hale and Prynne, had 
been set aside by Monk, and overruled. 



324 AN INQUIRENDO 

Monk was but a diaFs shadow, " the 
hand to the heart of the nation." He 
brought in not only the monarchy, but a 
potent individuality : one not led hither 
and thither, but a maker and marrer of 
his time. That melancholy figure was the 
axis of fast-flying and eccentric revelry. 
To some of us he is one of the most com- 
plex and interesting men in history. 
Judge him by old report and general 
current belief, and he is " dead body and 
damned soul " ; examine his own speech 
and script, and the testimony of those who 
had him at close range from his boyhood : 
and lo, he has heights and distances, as 
well as abysses ; he is self-possessed, not 
possessed of the devil ; he is dangerous, 
if you will, but not despicable. Following 
an evil star, he, at least, after Ovid, per- 
ceived and approved the highest. Until 
the Georgian succession, his was a popular 
memory. But with the Stuart decadence, 
and the consummation of what The Royalist 
smartly labels as " the great Protestant 
Swindle," down went his name with better 
names : all, from Laud to Claverhouse, 
doomed to share a long obloquy and 
calumny, from which they are singly being 



AN INQUIRENDO 325 

rescued at last, as from the political pit. 
I know nothing so illustrious of Charles 
the Playgoer as that he was able to win 
the strong attachment of Dr. Samuel John- 
son, albeit a century of ill repute lay 
between. Our wise critic, though he 
formulated it not, must have seen clearly 
the duplex cause of the King's failure in 
life. For half of that failure there is a 
theological term. Permit me to use it, 
and to illumine the whole subject by it : 
no flash-light is keener. Charles the 
Second was unfaithful to Divine Grace. 
Again, no man, endowed with so exquisite 
a sense of humor in over-development, 
can, of his own volition alone, escape lassi- 
tude, errancy, and frivolity founded on 
scorn. Humor, as a corrective, is well : 

but 

— ** the little more, and how much it is ! " 

To have been born with a surplus of it 
is to be elf-struck and incapacitated. 
Nothing is worth while, nothing is here 
nor there ; the only way to cut short the 
torture of self-observation and the infamy 
of not being able to form a prejudice, is to 
abandon ideals. Pass over, in the King, 
this too mordant and too solvent intelli- 



326 AN INQUIRENDO 

gence, and you lose the key to a strange 
career. Perhaps two of his ancestors, 
two of the Haroun-al-Raschid temper, 
dominated him : the gallant Gudeman of 
Ballangleich, and as a nearer influence on 
Charles, that gay, beloved, fickle, easily- 
masterful man, his grandsire of Navarre. 
He was like these, and in harmony with 
their adventurous soldier-world : naturally, 
he was incurably out of joint with his own 
isle, her confused introspective moods 
hardly subsided. He was a philosopher, 
and above all, an artist : such a king, in 
England, can never be the trump card. 
He seems to have thought out the situa- 
tion, and to have capitulated with all his 
heart. We need not tell each other that 
he might have been different. Let us 
mend our tenses, and agree that he would 
and must have been different, in Scotland 
or in France. 

Yet Lord Capell's dying word was 
right : his King, though a traitor, and 
intellectually as homesick for France as 
Mary Stuart before him, was " a very per- 
fect Englishman " ; he had, in some degree, 
every quality which goes to make up the 
lovableness of English character; and his 



AN INQUIRENDO 327 

Latin vices, large to the eye, are festooned 
around him, rather than rooted in him. 
One who knows the second Charles, all in 
all, and still preserves a great kindness for 
him, might do worse than borrow for his 
epitaph what Mr. Henley has written of 
Lovelace, Richardson's Lovelace, " the 
completest hero of fiction." " He has 
wit, humor, grace, brilliance, charm : he 
is a scoundrel and a ruffian ; and he is a 
gentleman, and a man." 

CLAY 

{After a pause, shyly.) That 's all. 
Will it do, Wetherell ? 

WETHERELL 

Why, yes ; on the whole. It is — well, 
lopsided ; and so mortal serious, you 
know. Not that it is n't great fun, too. 
You will carry the audience. You really 
ought not to : it is a sort of abduction ! 
{They stroll out through the Horse Guards , 
and towards Parliament Square^ 

MRS. WETHERELL 

I thought you might say something 
about Chelsea Hospital. It is a good 
thing, I am sure ; and Charles the Second 
was the founder. 



328 AN INQUIRENDO 

WETHERELL 

No, Nell Gwynne : she put him up 
to it. I am told 'the old war-dogs over 
there will eat you. Lord love 'em, if you 
say a word against either of these. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

What was she like ? 

CLAY 

Oh, wild honey. Just such a one as 
Mr. Du Maurier's Trilby. 

WETHERELL 

Quite true, quite true ! {They laugh.) 
A capital comparison : thank you for it. 
And comparisons, being odorous, remind 
me of my dinner. Rhoda very much 
wishes you to come home with us. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Please do, Mr. Clay, and quite as you 
are. No one but ourselves and my nice 
New York cousins, whom we are going to 
meet. We shall dine early, so that you may 
have time afterwards, before your lecture. 

WETHERELL 

To repent. 

CLAY 

Aye, quicksilver creature ! to re-dress. 
There ! Mrs. Wetherell, have I not 
understood you and avenged you, too ? 



AN INQUIRENDO 329 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Indeed, you always do. Will you 
come ? 

CLAY 

Many thanks to you ; I should like 
nothing better. Will you mind if we go 
directly into the Abbey ? It is early yet 
for your appointment ; but I should 
delight in showing you the effigy. I '11 
wager a full farthing Percy never saw it. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

The effigy ? 

CLAY 

Yes ; King Charles the Second's. 

WETHERELL 

Heigho ! it would seem that we have 
not buried the biographee, after all. But 
I am sceptical. I remember no effigy. 
Unfold. 

CLAY 

Here we are at the porch. Just follow 

me. . . . {^Fhey go quietly in file through 
the north transept and ambulatory^ and up 
the great steps of Henry the Seventh' s 
Chapel^ There : to the right ; inside, 
east end. How dark it is ! 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Are n't you coming } 



330 AN INQUIRENDO 

CLAY 

No ; if you will excuse me. Conceive 
of me as sentimental ; I hate to step over 
that slab, or go by it, somehow. 

WETHERELL 

{Farther up.) Not a soul here, to 
adore this surpassing tomb of Lady Rich- 
mond. There 's art for you ! But no 
effigy of yours visible. Your infallibility 
waneth. Animus vester ego, Argilla mea ! 
the which is choice Schoolboy for — 
Mind your eye, O Clay. 

CLAY 

Of course there 's none now. 

WETHERELL 

Avaunt, then, deceiving monster! 

CLAY 

But it used to stand, with Anne, 
WiUiam and Mary, and with Monk be- 
hind it, there on the site of the old altar- 
stone ; his name is cut over the vault. 
That is where Dr. Johnson visited it 
often. 

WETHERELL 

I had forgotten. What were you say- 
ing about stepping over the slab ? 

CLAY 

Not that slab. I meant the other. 



AN INQUIRENDO 331 

where Mrs. Wetherell is standing. The 
tragic names are all together there : Mary 
Queen of Scots, Rupert, and the lovely 
and dear Queen of Bohemia, and young 
Henry of Gloucester, and poor Arabella 
Stuart, and — 

MRS. WETHERELL 

[Slowly reading) — ten infant children of 
King James the Second, and eighteen 
infant children of Queen — 

WETHERELL 

Tee-hee ! 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Percy ! 

CLAY 

Sure enough, it does sound ticklish ! 
But hush, Wetherell : people will hear. 
{They descend.) That verger in the dim 
amber light, standing in the dear little 
doorway of S. John's, will let us see the 
cases in the chantry. You have to show 
the Dean's pass. Wait a moment: I must 
get mine. [He draws a card from his 
-pocket and approaches the verger^ who im- 
mediately leads the way to the stair of the 
Islip Chapel^ 

MRS. WETHERELL 

{First on the stair, five minutes after.) 



332 AN INQUIRENDO 

Ghastly things ! Truly, are n*t they per- 
fectly appalling ? 

THE VERGER 

Oh, it *s wax, you know, is nt it ? 
We think them uncommonly precious. 
So ancient, ma'am. Carried at their own 
funerals, and dressed in their own clothes. 
King Charles the Second, this is : he \ 
the oldest genuine one of those we show. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Can it be possible that this lace all 
black with age, this beautiful lace — ? Yes, 
it is point ! {Hangs enraptured^ 

WETHERELL 

The head is surprisingly fine, for any- 
thing of the half-spook half-dolly order. 
You say it was modelled on the death- 
mask ? 

CLAY 

Yes ; you have seen it in the Museum. 

WETHERELL 

I like it better than any of the por- 
traits. It gives one a gentler impression, 
somehow. Who are these } {He and his 
wife move on to the Duchess of Bucking- 
hamshire and ^een Anne.) 

CLAY 

As for me, I shall stay with you, of 



AN INQUIRENDO 333 

course, my poor old never-obsolete Most 
Sacred Majesty. What a pity you shirked 
your work so ! 

*' Qu'as-tu fait, 6 toi que voila, 
De ta jeunesse ? ' ' 

Ahj well ! It is not beyond my right to 
say that to you, since I am the only one 
alive who loves you. 

TWO FEMALE VOICES BELOW 

Cousin Rhoda ! Rhoda ! Percy ! We 
saw you come up, from where the Coro- 
nation Chair is ; and the little door was 
left open. Oh, is n't this splendid to 
find you ? How do you do ? 

THE VERGER 

I beg your pardon, gentlemen ; Even- 
song is just about to begin. 

WETHERELL 

Thank you ; then we the heathen must 
go at once. Clay, let me present you to 
— See : he 's in dreamland. 

MRS. WETHERELL 

I wonder if thoughts of dinner can 
rouse him. 

WETHERELL 

Not unless you can provide the suit- 
ably archaic wild boar, and the flask of 
canary. 



334 



AN INQUIRENDO 



THE MISSES FRANEY 

You both look so well ! Dreadful, 
Percy, if you '11 believe it. The steward- 
ess said there had not been such a passage 
for — 

MRS. WETHERELL 

Hurry, Cornelia. The service is 
beginning. 

{A strain from the organ wakes Clay, He 
follows them down, tiptoeing past the filling 
pewSy covering the oak-twig still in his hat.) 

WETHERELL 

{In an undertone, on the threshold^ 
The air is good, again. Lo, I perceive 
the genial 'bus yonder, also several nimble 
cabs. Come, ladies fair ; come. Clay. 
You shall eat posthumously in the nine- 
teenth century, and make us all drink the 
health of " the Blackbird " ; as the old 
song has it. 



^^ 



t T 



^ g ffi£g 



With a fa la 14, la-la, la-la, la la la, with a fa la 14, la-la, Id, 



{Clay smiles, and they pass out into the 
Square?) 



THIS BOOK WAS PRINTED BY 
JOHN WILSON AND SON, AT 
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAM- 
BRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, DUR- 
ING MAY, 1897 



These essays have appeared, during the 
last ten years, in The Contributor's Club 
of The Atlantic Monthly^ The Chap-Book, 
The Independent, The Catholic World, and 
The Providence Journal. An Open Letter 
to the Moon, and On Teaching One s Grand- 
mother to Suck Eggs, are reprinted, by per- 
mission, from Goosequill Papers, Roberts 
Brothers, Boston, 1885. 



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